


Bad Timing

by pirate_smile



Category: The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Until it isn't, and swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 45,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25268542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirate_smile/pseuds/pirate_smile
Summary: Paul was lucky enough to be one of the few people to get a soulmate.He was not lucky enough to meet them before a meteor crashed in to the Starlight Theater.
Relationships: Paul Matthews/Emma Perkins, Xander Lee/John McNamara
Comments: 64
Kudos: 87





	1. Just a Smudge

**Author's Note:**

> Paul & Emma's families react very differently to life-changing news.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paul & Emma's families react very differently to life-changing news.

When Paul showed his mother the ink spot that had appeared on his left wrist that wouldn’t come off, she had been over the moon. She’d yelled about how amazing it was and pulled him into a fierce hug. She wouldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the night.

“You have a soul mark, sweetie!” she had said, grasping his shoulders. “Do you know what this means?”

Paul knew the question was rhetorical. Of course he knew what it meant. Every human being on the planet knew how to spot the beginnings of a soul mark before the age of ten, even with the scarcity of occurrence.

“Yeah, Mom,” he said, monotone. “A soulmate.”

His mom hugged him some more and cooed about guaranteed happiness and how she was so happy for him.

Paul knew what the soul mark meant. It probably meant all of the things his mom was talking about. True love, happily ever after, and all that. But that was in the future, probably way off in the future. He didn’t expect to meet his soulmate at the age of eleven. Right now, though, this soul mark was bound to make Paul’s life even worse, if that was possible. He was already bullied in school for a smattering of reasons. It was bad enough Paul was a small kid with an anxiety disorder who cried a lot. The teasing had become so mean and persistent that his mother had gotten a call from his teacher about some episode or another about once a month for nearly three years. His classmates didn’t need any more reasons to think he was a freak, but now he would be the first marked person in Hatchetfield since the 70s. He’d be like a dodo bird in a cage.

So Paul found it hard to share his mother’s enthusiasm. He barely had the strength to smile with her.

She quieted down after a little while and put a gentle hand on his cheek. He looked up from where he’d been rubbing at the offending wrist. Paul had scrubbed and scrubbed at the little spot all day, but against his wishes, it had stayed.

Paul’s mother smiled sympathetically at him. “Do you want me to go out and buy you some patches?”

Paul nodded emphatically. He’d forgotten about patches! No one would ever know he was wearing one, let alone know he had a mark. He’d seen them advertised on TV. They were supposed to blend in with the shades of the wearer’s skin, and the edges were supposed to be undetectable. The only way to know someone was wearing one was to see them take it off. It was the perfect camouflage. Maybe Paul could get away with not having a new reason to be the class punching bag. Maybe he could start to blend in.

His mother’s hand slipped down to his shoulder and she gave it a supportive squeeze. “I’ll pick some up when I get home from work tomorrow.”

“Wait,” Paul said, brow furrowing. “People are going to see you buying them.” Paul had lived in Hatchetfield all his life. He knew what the island was like. It was a gossipy small town where everybody knew pretty much everybody else. And everybody knew everything about everybody else. If Paul’s mom went to the store and bought soul patches, people would see her buying them, because Hatchetfield people couldn’t mind their own business. If people saw Paul’s mom buying soul patches, they would know he had a mark. He was the right age for one to develop, and they wouldn’t have seen her buying patches before, so obviously she wasn’t buying them for herself. Then they would tell everyone. Then he and his mark would be the talk of the town. The patch would be pointless.

Paul’s mom pursed her lips in thought. She had clearly followed his line of thought without him having to say it. “If you can hold out for a couple more days, I can buy some in Clivesdale, instead.”

Paul nodded down toward his toes. He was anxious about the mark, but he also felt bad about putting his mom through the hassle of crossing the Nantucket Bridge. Plus, patches were a bit expensive since they worked so well and were needed by so few people. He also felt terrible about not being excited about the mark like he should have been.

She pulled him into another hug, one that was less crushing this time, and he returned it. She rested her chin on the top of his head.

“Paul, this in proof that there is someone out there who is going to love you more than I do, which I didn’t think was even possible. You may not find them soon, but you will find them. You are worthy of love and happiness. Don’t you forget that, okay?” She pressed a kiss into the top of his head.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay.” She smiled, and Paul had to smile back.

⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫

Emma felt a little stupid for not being the one to notice her soul mark first, but Jane always had a way of making her feel stupid, whether she meant to or not.

To be fair to Emma, her hands and wrists were usually smudged with some sort of ink or charcoal or pencil or something like that. How was she supposed to figure out that that one tiny dot wasn’t actually an imprint from the butterflies she had doodled in her notebook instead of paying attention to the War of 1812? It was an easy mistake to make.

Emma had been sketching a detailed rendition of a hyacinth in her and Jane’s room one afternoon when her sister got home from school. Her weapon of choice today was pencil, and she was liking how the petals were looking so far. Jane peered over her shoulder to get a look, and Emma quickly huddled over the paper to block it from view. She shot Jane a warning glare.

Some teasing remark clearly on the tip of her older sister’s tongue died when her gaze caught something, and she froze.

“Emma. What is that?” she said, pointing.

Emma followed Jane’s finger. “Uh, my wrist?”

“No,” Jane drawled cryptically, a sardonic grin splitting across her face. “That’s a mark, isn’t it? Oh, I bet it is! You little brat, how come you get to be the one who has one?”

Emma squinted at her wrist. Yeah, there was still an ink stain there from a few days ago, having not faded at all when all the others had been wiped clean. When she thought about it, it did look a little bigger than it had before.

“This is so not fair, Emma,” Jane continued. “You wouldn’t even know what to do with a soulmate.”

Emma’s face shot up. “I would so! That’s the whole point of them, isn’t it?”

Jane just groaned and left the room. Emma heard her tell their parents she was studying at a friend’s house and the opening and closing of the front door with more force than was necessary.

Emma scrunched up her face in confusion. Jane could be annoying sometimes, but she was never usually that mean for no reason. What was her deal? Emma hadn’t done anything!

Over the next couple of days, Emma caught Jane sending disdainful glances at her left wrist. It made Emma’s anger boil. What was so bad about her having a soulmate? She deserved love just like everyone else. She deserved to have one good thing that was hers, that wasn’t forced into the shadows behind every achievement of Jane’s.

Out of spite, Emma chose to leave her wrist bare as the mark grew and mutated into its final form, just so Jane had to look at it. It took about a month, and once it seemed to have settled, Jane scoffed and murmured under her breath, “Figures your soul mark would look like that.”

That little comment had sparked a full on yelling match between the sisters, something that had happened only a handful of times. Normally, Emma and Jane got along well enough to at least coexist. Fighting between them was rare, and a fight like this one was nearly unmatched. They hurled insults at each other until their dad stepped in and commanded Emma to go to their room.

She sulked into the bedroom, knowing she was getting sent away so dad could get the “real story” from the family golden child. She slumped into the chair at her desk and stared at the mark. It looked like a tattoo. It was definitely unconventional, but that was what she liked about it. It had an attitude. She knew from the sappy romance movies Jane liked that soul marks were a symbol representing a unique moment between the two soulmates. A moment when they met, when they shared a special connection, anything, really. As long as it was intimate. The moment was supposed to be an indicator for the rest of the relationship.

If it really meant all of that, Emma was glad her mark was unconventional. That meant her soulmate wouldn’t be boring. That she and her soulmate could be weird together, or something.

The next day, Emma’s parents told her she would have to cover up her mark since it was “upsetting Jane”. Emma had tried to kick up a fuss about that. It was her mark, after all, she should be the one to choose if people saw it or not. But her parents left no room for argument. They would stop her before she left for school and check to make sure she had a patch on. They grounded her when they saw her come home without it on. It was frustrating.

Emma didn’t see the point of wearing a patch in Hatchetfield. Everyone in town already knew her as “the marked girl” before they knew her name. ‘Did you hear the marked girl snuck out of history class again?’ ‘Who’s that playing Bonnie Jean?’ ‘Oh, that’s the marked girl.’ She wasn’t concealing anything from anybody. Besides, Jane already knew what it looked like, so she wasn’t even hiding it from Jane. It was just a waste of money. Emma made these points to her parents several times over six years, but they never listened.

When Emma finally graduated from Hatchetfield High and left the restrictive town and her restrictive parents for good, she had ripped off the patch she was wearing and threw the rest of them in the garbage. She was going to be her own person in Guatemala, and that started with a bare wrist.

On her travels, people asked her if she had found “the one”, why she wasn’t looking, and if she was okay. In that order. To Emma, all of those questions were ridiculous. One, if she had found her soulmate, she wouldn’t be hostel-hopping on her own through the mountains. She’d be hostel-hopping with _them_ through the mountains, at least. Second, the concept of looking for her soulmate was pointless. There was a fated time and place she was supposed to meet them, right? They’d show up when they were ready. Third, she was doing great, thank you, better than she had in her entire life in Hatchetfield. Cross-country backpacking was a great way to forget superficial problems, and the views she got out of it were to die for. The canvases she painted didn’t do them justice, but just attempting to capture the beauty calmed her turbulent spirit.

Besides, she didn’t need her soulmate to be happy. Even with the mark, people still slept with her. Of course they did, she was young and hot.

She had everything she needed here. The more time she spent in Guatemala, the more that felt true. The more Jane called asking Emma if she would come back to Hatchetfield for some reason or another – Jane’s wedding, their parent’s anniversary, the birth of her nephew – the more she felt the chafe of her old life and how glad she was to be rid of it.

She found some excuse not to go back every time her sister called. It would take a miracle to get Emma Perkins back into Hatchetfield.

Or, apparently, a car crash.


	2. Daily Routine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paul gets a coffee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kind reception on the first chapter!

Paul glanced at the time on his computer. 1:27 pm. He nodded to himself and stood from his desk.

“I’m going to go get some coffee from Beanies. Anyone want to come?” he asked the room, even though he was really only talking to the coworkers on either side of him.

To his left, Charlotte took another swig from her flask. After the phone call she had just had with her husband, Paul thought coffee was maybe the last thing she needed.

“Bill?” he prompted to the man on his right. Bill was a remarkably nice man and did go with Paul to get coffee most days.

“I can’t,” said Bill begrudgingly. “I’ve got to keep refreshing this webpage. I’ve got Alice for one more night before she goes home to Clivesdale. Her mother, just to make me look small, took her all the way to New York to see Hamilton. And she loved it!”

Paul thought he must be Bill’s go-to guy for complaining about his ex-wife. He felt he must know every detail of their spiteful feud to get their teenage daughter to like them more than their ex. He wasn’t particularly interested in getting the gossip, but Paul was always willing to be Bill’s sympathetic ear when he needed it.

“So,” Bill continued. “to prove to my ex-wife that two can play at that game, I’m on HotTix right now, and the moment more become available, I’m getting two tickets for tonight. Because guess what, Paul? It’s finally here. The touring production of Mamma Mia!”

Yikes, Paul thought. Even he knew that Mamma Mia was a definitive step down from Hamilton. Not that he was going to tell Bill that when he seemed so excited. Plus, it wasn’t like Bill had time to make different plans.

“Wow,” he responded, unable to keep flatness from his voice. “She’ll like that just as much as Hamilton.”

Bill just shrugged. “It’s a musical.” As if that excused it. “Hey, do you want to tag along? Alice would get a kick out of it. She thinks you’re cool. Remember when you used to babysit her and drive her to school?”

Paul remembered. Probably better than Bill did, given his description. Paul remembered watching Alice a handful of times when she was twelve during the evenings Bill and his ex-wife had to be at a divorce hearing. He remembered his interactions with Alice being amiable at best. The rides back to her house were silent save for the quiet hum of top 40 hits on the radio that neither of them listened to. Once they got there, he would ask her about her day, she’d say it was fine, and she’d go up to her room until he’d heated up the leftovers Bill had left for dinner. Paul was certain she had not thought he was cool. Which was fine with Paul, she was ten years younger than him and he really wasn’t cool.

That had been five years ago. Since then, the most he’d seen of Alice was in pictures on Bill’s phone. Bill was just buttering him up to get him to go.

“Maybe you can talk me up a bit,” Bill said. “Let her know her old dad is pretty cool, too!”

If Paul went along, he was sure he would make Bill look just about as cool as Alice thought her father was, which would not be an improvement. On top of that, he’d be sitting through a musical. There weren’t a lot of things that could break through Paul’s painful social awareness and awkwardness, but musicals were one of them.

“Bill,” Paul said. “No. Sorry.”

Bill’s face fell. “You’d rather do nothing then come with us to go see Mamma Mia?”

“Bill, I’d rather do anything than go see Mamma Mia. The idea of sitting there trapped in a musical is my own personal hell.”

Paul tried to offer to buy Bill a drink from Beanies to make up for not wanting to go see Mamma Mia – and probably ruin Bill’s attempt at getting Alice to like him better in the process – but Bill was single-minded in his idea that Mamma Mia was going to save his relationship with his daughter. This was going to be one of Paul’s solo trips to Beanies. Not that he minded. In a lot of ways, he like going alone better.

Of course, just as he had that thought, he was jumped by Ted.

“Hey, are you going to Beanies?” Ted asked, with the air of a man who knew Paul went to Beanies at 1:25 pm every day. “You didn’t invite me.”

“Sorry, Ted, do you want to come?”

“No, no…” Ted said, falsely nonchalant. That was the trick to dealing with Ted, usually. His modus operandum was just to give Paul trouble. Ted teased just about everyone, but Paul, as he’d always been, was an easy target. He had dealt with a lot worse growing up, so it wasn’t hard for him to brush Ted’s mocking aside. “I don’t want to show you up, huh?” Ted winked.

“What do you mean?” Paul asked, starting to get nervous.

“Paul. Come on. I know why you walk that extra block instead of just going to Starbucks.”

Paul chuckled. “I don’t want to give my money to some corporate chain.” He was clenching and unclenching his fists.

Ted wasn’t buying it. “You sure it doesn’t have anything to do with that cute little barista over there? The ‘Latte Hottay’ as she is known throughout the land?”

There was another trick to dealing with Ted: tactical retreat.

“Bye, Ted.” Paul said hurriedly as he rushed away from his coworker. He could hear Ted calling out to him, but he ignored it.

Paul tried not to think about it, but he knew Ted was right. The pretty barista was one of the big reasons Paul chose Beanies to be a part of his daily routine, and an even bigger reason why he liked going alone. He had a hard enough time trying to talk to her without someone watching him struggle.

It was a weird feeling, having a crush. As childish as it sounded, that’s what it was. Paul had never had one before. Being marked basically meant he was already spoken for, so what was the point in having feelings for anyone other than his soulmate?

Not that he knew the pretty barista wasn’t his soulmate. With the existence of the patch, he couldn’t know for sure, but he didn’t have any reason to think that his mark represented her in any way. The closest he’d come to figuring it out, he thought, was back in 2003, when his class had been bussed to Hatchetfield High to see their production of Brigadoon. When, about halfway through the first act, Paul realized he hated musicals, he noticed he’d been absently tapping his concealed mark. Was that what the mark meant? That his soulmate was someone who hated musicals with him? It seemed like a superficial thing to bond over, but maybe it was just a start. He’d let himself get hopeful that he would meet his soulmate right then, that the day wouldn’t be a total waste, but he hadn’t met anyone new that day. Paul had shrugged it off, but a part of him was disappointed.

It would have been really nice to know his soulmate in high school. The bullying he’d suffered in elementary school and junior high had let up like he had hoped, but he was still lonely. His mother was great, and he loved her to bits, but it would have been nice to have a friend his own age to get through the days with. Someone he could be certain wouldn’t get frustrated or bored and give up on him.

The bells above the door to Beanies jingled. As he entered, he saw a commotion over at the register. A customer was yelling that Beanies was about to lose his business over some sign being bullshit.

“Oh my god, so mean!” came a voice from the register, thickly coated with sarcasm.

As the outraged customer stormed out, Paul saw the owner of the voice, a small barista who was flipping the rude man off as he left.

The air left Paul’s lungs. That was her. Paul’s “Latte Hottay”.

In Paul’s mind, she was easily the most beautiful person in all of Hatchetfield, and he knew practically all of Hatchetfield. Big, brown eyes that sparkled when she was amused or mad, like she was now. A sharp jawline that reminded Paul of cut stone. A new smile for every occasion, but always proudly displayed her white teeth. She was adorably small, being maybe a foot shorter than Paul, but what she lacked in height she made up for in wit and confidence. He admired the way she had no qualms telling off a customer who was knowingly being a jerk. Paul had never had much guts, and he was terrible at standing up for himself. Her boldness was inspiring.

His mind, which usually ran a mile a minute, short circuited as he walked up the counter, just like it always did. The barista didn’t go to take his order right away, though. Another woman in a Beanies uniform came out from the back to talk to her. Paul knew that lady was the pretty barista’s boss, so he waited patiently while they argued.

Paul’s eyes drifted to the counter and he saw the sign the angry customer had complained about. “Tip for a Song!” it said in bubble letters, surrounded by cutesy musical notes. Paul grimaced. Being forced to sing a song every time a customer wanted to get rid of loose change? That was just humiliating. He could see why the pretty barista was clearly against it.

He tuned back in when he saw the boss head back to the back room. The pretty barista was left alone again, her shoulders bunched up to her ears. She turned to face him with a look of barely contained rage.

Paul smiled at her, trying to silently apologize for his existence. She returned it, but only because that was what she was supposed to do.

“Hi, how can I help you?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah,” he stumbled. Paul always had a hard time getting the simplest phrases out around her. “I’ve got an easy one for you: just a cup of black coffee.” He hoped his easy order would relieve some of the tension she was obviously feeling.

As she began making his coffee, Paul felt the urge to do something nice for her, to balance out all the crap she had gotten from the last customer. He pulled a five dollar bill out of his wallet and dropped it in a tip jar. He hoped she would find it after he left. It would let her know she was appreciated without him having to take credit for it.

Unfortunately, she turned to look at him right as he dropped the bill in the jar. She groaned. “Jesus, really?”

For a second, he was confused. Why was she mad about getting a tip? Then, she started to sing a dumb little song about making coffee, and he remembered the sign. How had he forgotten about it?

“No, no, no!” Paul interrupted her as quickly as he could, hoping not to make her madder. She stopped and sent him a bewildered look. “I’m sorry. I don’t need you to sing. I just tipped you because…” He hesitated. He couldn’t tell her he tipped because he didn’t like seeing her so stressed and angry and he wanted to make her feel better. That was not an appropriate thing to say to a barista whose name he did not know. Paul decided instead he would go for a cool, casual angle.

He leaned against the counter. “…people should tip.”

The barista huffed out a laugh. This was why he never thought he was cool. Every time he tried to be, he never pulled it off.

But then she smiled at him warmly and it was all worth it.

“Well, thank you,” she said. “I mean, if I have to sing for it, it’s not really a tip, right? It’s just like I have another shitty-paying job on top of my already shitty-paying job. Because, I mean, most of my tips are less than a buck? So, after the split, I’m making, like, not even twenty-five cents a song. That is less than a fucking jukebox. Only a jukebox doesn’t also have to make coffee for these assholes!”

As he paid her for his coffee, Paul just listened to her ramble. He loved how easily she could speak her mind. He always hated the puzzle of trying to work out what people meant when they said things. He was often wrong when it really mattered. The barista was the kind of woman who just said what she was feeling. No unsaid implications, no guesswork. It was refreshing. On top of that, her ramblings were entertaining. She was funny. Paul thought he could probably listen to her talk for hours without getting bored or uncomfortable. It was a new feeling for him.

The pretty barista paused and considered Paul for a moment. “Not that you’re an asshole. Well, maybe you are, what did you tip?”

Paul felt panic seize him. What would she think when she saw the five dollar bill? Would she be thankful? Would she think he was a creep? Would she hate him? Would she refuse to serve him ever again, or get him banned?

He did everything in his power to keep his face neutral as she reached into the jar. The few seconds she stayed silent, just looking at his tip, were agony.

She leaned over the counter toward him. “You meant this just for me, right? I don’t have to split this with anyone?”

Paul nodded vigorously. “That’s for you. I don’t give a shit about them.”

She chuckled as she put the tip into the pocket of her apron. Paul felt relief sweep over him.

“That’s very sweet,” the pretty barista said as she went back to making Paul’s coffee. “God, I’m just so sick of Nora” – her boss, Paul guessed – “and Zoey.” She drew out the last syllable of that name. Paul thought that must have been the other barista who had appeared from the break room earlier and then almost immediately went back in. He wasn’t sure how that barista maintained employment. He never saw her work. “Who is technically my manager even though she is ten years younger than me. Ugh, she hired all of her little theater friends and they will not” – she put a finger to her ear and sang – “ _shut the fuck up_ about some shitty production of Godspell they did last summer.”

Those details sounded familiar. “That was the one at the rec center, right?” he asked. She nodded. “I think I had to see that.”

The pretty barista groaned from behind the machines.

“I did not like it,” he said.

She reemerged with the black coffee pitcher, looking vindicated. “Yeah, it sucked, right?”

“Yeah. They shouldn’t call it Godspell, more like God-Awful.”

She poured coffee into a to-go cup and smiled. “Yeah, or God-Damn, That Was Bad.”

Paul laughed, maybe a little too loud for the mostly empty coffee shop. The pretty barista joined him.

“I don’t like musicals.”

Paul had not meant to say that, but it seemed he couldn’t shut himself up. “Watching people sing and dance makes me very uncomfortable.” Way to go, Paul. You might as well just tell her you have anxiety at this point and see how quickly she stops talking to you.

The pretty barista handed him his coffee. “Then why did you come to the singing coffee shop? There’s a Starbucks down the street.”

His mouth acted without his permission again. “Well, you know. Some things are worth it.”

The strange look she sent him panicked him enough to give him back control of his words. “Like damn good coffee!” He took a swig and gave her a thumbs up. The coffee was scalding, but he suppressed a wince.

The strange look mutated into one of amusement. She returned his thumbs up and considered him again.

“I see you in here all the time, don’t I? What’s your name?”

“Paul.”

“Hi, Paul. I’m Emma.”

He’d opened his mouth to say something when the bells above the door jingled and a nerdy-looking teenage boy walked briskly past Paul and up to the counter. The teen wasted no time letting Emma give her standard greeting before he rattled off his order and how important it was that he got it soon because of his blood sugar.

Paul knew he had to get back to work. “Bye, Emma!” he called as he walked to the door. Emma was preoccupied, so she didn’t move to respond. He decided that he would just leave her be. The bells above the door jingled as he left the coffee shop.

"Emma," he said quietly to himself as he stood outside of Beanies. He tasted the feeling of her name in his mouth. He liked it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Paul stole that coffee in the original show and it haunts me to this day.


	3. Early Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma gets an early start to her day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's a bit short compared to what's coming, but here you go!

Emma pushed the heel of her hand into her eye as she looked at the time on her phone. 4:16 am. Why the ever-loving fuck was Nora texting her at four in the morning?

It was a group text sent to her, Zoey, and one of Zoey’s stupid friends Emma had never met. Apparently, due to “difficulties interpreting the new policy”, Nora had “expanded the description of the policy” and had come up with “a standard song and dance” to “eliminate insecurities in performing for the customers”.

Emma stared sightlessly at her screen. What complete bullshit! She voices her opinions about a demeaning new rule, and Nora not only threatens to fire her, but then she punishes Emma by forcing her to go to work at 4:30 in the goddamn morning to learn some shitty choreography to some shitty song that she’s going to have to sing twenty fucking times a day for ungrateful assholes? Nora couldn’t treat her like this, could she? Like she was a circus animal who also served hors d'oeuvres?

Emma had been seething since she had left her apartment. She and Nora were at an impasse. Nora wanted to fire her because of Emma’s attitude with her and the customers. Emma wanted to quit because being repeatedly disrespected by her judgy, shitty hometown was a form of torture for Emma. And because Nora was a self-important bitch.

But Nora couldn’t fire Emma because Emma was her only barista with any sense of work ethic and she single-handedly worked about forty-percent of operating hours a week. And Emma couldn’t quit because she needed a job somewhere that would let her work way too many hours because she desperately needed the money. Emma discovered quickly that putting herself through community college on top of paying rent on her apartment cost a lot of money, especially when she had no family to help her in case something happened. She was working herself to the bone between classes and Beanies, but she was still above water, financially, and her grades were good.

So, Emma and Nora were in a deadlock. Nora had to suffer through Emma’s frequent arguments with the asshole customers, and Emma had to suffer through Nora’s crazy power trips.

It was now 9:10 am. The shop had been open for three hours and no one had tipped yet, which Emma was thankful for. She considered waiting until everyone had their backs turned and hiding the “Tip for a Song!” sign – and the bell Nora had put there, _Jesus_ – so she wouldn’t have to perform the stupid tip song.

Emma was in the back washing some mugs, while Nora pretended to be busy at her computer and Zoey lounged on the couch in the breakroom on her phone, when she heard the bells above the door jingle again. Emma suppressed a groan. She was being summoned. She rolled her eyes as she finished drying off the mug in her hands.

“Hello?!” she heard a man scream. “Hello?! Please, God, I just want a black coffee!”

Woof, that guy must be having a rough morning. She was pretty sure he was sobbing. She huffed a sigh and got into position before backing into the main café area. She began singing the dumb little entrance song Nora had written.

“ _Black coffee, I’m your coffee gal, here I come to –_ ”

“NO!”

The man cut her off with an ear-piercing scream. Emma whipped around and saw the nice guy from yesterday.

“No, Emma, not you, too!” he pleaded. “Please, God, Emma, stop singing!” He had a white-knuckled grip on the counter and his face was red and contorted.

“Okay, okay, I’ll stop,” she said, placatingly. Then, she remembered what he had said yesterday. Singing and dancing makes him uncomfortable. She snapped her fingers in his direction. “I didn’t forget! You’re the guy who doesn’t like musicals. Paul, right?” She went to grab a to-go cup.

“Emma, you’re talking to me. Like a normal person.”

Emma briefly wondered what kind of shitty morning he had had, because it must have been worse than hers, somehow.

“Yeah, and if my boss catches me, I’ll get canned. New company policy: not only do we have to sing when people tip, but when they enter, when they order, all the time, apparently!”

She wasn’t really paying attention to what she was saying. Sure, it felt great to complain about the singing to someone, but the whole situation had gotten her thinking about her mark. She watched her covered left wrist as she poured Paul’s coffee. Was Paul her soulmate? Since returning to Hatchetfield, Paul had been one of the only people she had met that was worth talking to, and she couldn’t deny the link between her mark and this whole singing situation. Its harsh, jagged lines were very reminiscent of her deep hatred for Nora’s delusional new policy. And Paul clearly didn’t like it, either.

She wanted to ask him about it, but…

“Emma, I think there is something terribly wrong with the world today,” he said, eyes wide as he scanned the shop for threats of danger.

…maybe she should wait until he’s calmed down a little bit.

“Fucking tell me about it. I spent the entire morning learning some dumbass new tip song. I’m exhausted.”

Emma held out his coffee for him. Paul took the coffee, slammed it back onto the counter and grabbed hold of her wrists, dragging her out from behind the counter toward the door. He leaned down to her level to speak to her.

“Emma, I feel like there is something sinister infecting Hatchetfield. I know this is going to sound crazy and not very scary, but it is scary if you think about the implications! Promise me you’ll think about the implications!” he begged.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I promise.” Paul was seriously starting to weird her out, but maybe she could talk him down if she knew what he was freaking out about.

“Okay! Emma, I think the world is becoming…” He paused, face twisting with disbelief and disgust. “…a musical.”

Emma had not gotten enough sleep last night to deal with whatever the hell Paul was going through. There might not be enough hours to sleep a night to deal with whatever Paul was going through. Either way, Emma found she would prefer to deal with asshole customers than the poor, broken man in front of her.

“Yeah, I’ve gotta –” she started. She took a step back toward the counter, but Paul grabbed her by the shoulders.

“Don’t say anything!” Paul yelped. He was still hunched over, his face eye-level and inches away from hers. “Let it sink in.”

“Okay,” Emma obliged. It sunk in that Paul likely had a few screws loose. Emma was not a saint; she had enough of her own problems that she figured she couldn’t be this man’s soulmate. Even as she thought this, Emma noticed other things in the corners of her mind. Like how strangely gentle Paul’s vice grip was. Like how insanely blue his eyes were. Blue like someone had cut little circles out of the high noon sky on a clear day in Guatemala. It was a shame that they were, at that moment, bugging out of his head.

“Now!” he shouted. She noticed his arms trembling. “Are you frightened?” Paul’s voice was shrill, and his face was beet red.

“Yeah, I think I am starting to get a bit frightened,” she said cautiously, trying once again to back out of his grip. Emma needed out of this situation.

The bell at the counter dinged. The next instant, Nora and Zoey popped out from out of nowhere and called out Emma’s name sweetly. Emma looked back at them and weighed her options. It was either sing the bullshit tip song with two of her least favorite people in front of a bunch of strangers or stay with Paul.

The decision was easy. “Sorry, Paul. I have to do this dumbass tip song,” She extricated herself from his hold on her. “Sorry!” She knew as she hurried into position next to Nora that she hadn’t sounded sorry, but she did not care.

As she and her coworkers started the tip song, Emma was reminded of how truly awful both the song and dance were. She hadn’t had any issues actually learning it, it was so simple a monkey could probably do it. It just made her feel like she was back in the fifties with all the overly-cutesy harmonies and dance moves. She wasn’t sure she could actually fault the lyrics since they were just about giving the customers coffee, but she still didn’t like them. As a sign of protest Emma kept her face stony throughout the number while Nora and Zoey had plastered fake smiles onto their faces.

When the choreography turned her toward the door, she saw Paul had sat down at one of the tables and he was tapping the sides of his fists together. His eyes were still peeled wide. When they met hers, she saw deep worry and fear. She sent him a confused look, one that said, “what the fuck is actually going on with you?”, before she turned back to the tip song.

The song was too long in Emma’s opinion, but it was over with pretty quickly. They just had to bring customers their coffee and it would be done. There were several cups over on the counter, one of them Paul’s, so Emma picked up that one. She abandoned the stupid dance move Nora had “encouraged” her to use when she brought coffee to tables.

She set his coffee down on the table he sat at and leaned in to whisper to him, “Are you okay?” Emma hoped the full weight of her meaning came across.

Paul leaned in, too. His tone was hushed and urgent. “Get out!”

“Emma!” Nora and Zoey called. They had one last flourish before the song was over. Emma scuttled back over to her coworkers.

The song ended after a couple of seconds. Or she thought it had, but Nora and Zoey kept dancing. Emma tried to keep up, but every time she started to do a move, Nora and Zoey were doing a different one. And that, for Emma, was the last straw.

“Alright, alright, stop!” Emma said, walking out of formation and toward the counter. “What is that? A whole other A-section? God, when did you learn that?” Emma shook her head and sighed. “When I got this job, I signed up to serve coffee and cold, shitty pastries. If I wanted to be in a musical, I’d be in a damn musical! Yeah, that’s right, Zoey. I was in Brigadoon in high school and I fucking killed it. But now, I’m just trying to make ends meet while I work my way through community college.” She began ripping off her apron. “And I can do that just as easily down the street at Starbucks. I quit!”

Emma took two steps toward the door before she was blocked by Nora and Zoey, still posing from the end of the song.

“You can’t quit, Emma,” they said in perfect unison, insincere smiles glued on their faces. “The song is so simple. We’ll teach it to you.”

Around her, the customers who just got their coffee all started coughing violently. When Emma looked, she saw everyone in the shop clutching their throats as they fell to the ground, choking for breath. Everyone but Paul, who had risen from his chair to hold the back of it. His eyes were flicking across the choking customers, wearing a confused and horrified expression she felt herself mirroring. Paul’s eyes caught hers.

“Why, everyone here will be singing it, soon!” Nora and Zoey continued cheerily, and the customers fell silent, slumped on the ground.

“What are you talking about?” Emma asked, warily. What the fuck is going on?

“They’ve all had their coffee. Their apotheosis will be upon them at any moment,” the baristas chorused. Was she imagining it, or were Nora and Zoey’s eyes glowing?

“Wait, what did you do to their coffee?” Emma rushed to the coffee pot on the counter, heart pounding like a hammer against her ribcage. She opened the top and peered inside. She could see a strange lump floating in the coffee. When she reached inside and pulled it out, electric blue slime stretched and bobbed out.

“Fucking gross!” she exclaimed. Looking back up at Paul, she saw his face go green as he fixed his eyes on the blue slime.

Suddenly, Nora and Zoey were singing again, but this time the tip song wasn’t about bringing customers their coffee. It was about poisoning innocent people with the goo. Emma confirmed their eyes were glowing, Zoey’s normally hazel eyes now awash with electric blue light identical to the goo from the coffee pot. They advanced on Emma as they danced, directing their threats at her. As they lunged forward to grab her, Emma screamed as she used her short stature to duck under Nora and Zoey’s arms. Not wanting to keep them out of sight for too long, she turned around to look at Nora and Zoey. As they sang, the fallen customers slowly rose from the floor, singing along with the baristas, their eyes blue as well.

“They’re singing,” Emma murmured, blindly feeling around with her hands as she took a few steps backward into Paul. He took hold of her wrists. “Why are they singing?” she screamed.

“We need to run, Emma,” he said, breathlessly. His eyes were serious and urgent. “Don’t look back, just run!”

She nodded, and they ran out of Beanies together.


	4. Relaxing A Bit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma talks to Paul. Paul listens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up for some canon-complaint gore. Nothing here that doesn't happen in the show, and no grotesque details!

Paul took his first deep breath since before he’d left the house this morning. When Ted had suggested that the musical number that he had witnessed on his way to work had been a flash mob, he hadn’t believed him. Flash mobs sang and danced with backing tracks, didn’t they? The display Paul had witnessed had been noticeably free of any instrumentals, and that had been worse, somehow. Then he had been called into Mr. Davidson’s office, and that had been the weirdest experience he’d ever had in his life, but it was also horrifying. He didn’t think he’d be able to forget the way Mr. Davidson smiled at him with those glowing blue eyes for a long time. He’d only just barely been able to escape his boss’s office, and from then it had been a whirlwind of seeking safety and finding singing.

After running out of Beanies, he and Emma had met up with Bill, Charlotte, and Ted from work, right before they all had been ambushed by some singing cops. One of them had been Charlotte’s asshole husband, Sam. Ted had managed to knock him out. After seeing an electric blue brain fly out of Sam’s head, they all agree to bring him to Professor Hidgens, Emma’s biology professor.

Seeing his house for himself, Paul agreed with Emma’s description of it as a “fortress”. A tall, electrified fence surrounded a large, concrete building. After meeting Professor Hidgens for himself, Paul did not agree with Emma’s description of him as “kooky”. Paul thought the old man was a bit of a maniac. He kept waving a gun at them and raving about aliens. However, with how crazy the world was right now, aliens didn’t sound so absurd.

Hidgens had left them alone in his basement to study some of the blue shit Sam’s open head was secreting. All of them except for Charlotte and Sam. Sam was still unconscious and handcuffed to a folding chair in the living room. Charlotte must have still been up there with her husband.

Paul had had a shot of whiskey from the professor’s bar to try to calm his buzzing nerves. Ted had decided to forego the use of glassware in favor of just downing gulps of bourbon straight from the bottle. Bill had been rummaging around the bar for something. For what, Paul didn’t know. Emma had simply plopped down on the floor, cross-legged, looking completely drained.

Paul removed his suit jacket and, for the first time, thought about the situation he was in. They’d called it an apocalypse already, but he let that truth sink in. The _apocalypse_. Unlike Hidgens, apparently, Paul could not have foreseen the apocalypse as a singing, dancing, alien nightmare. He hadn’t wanted to test his claim from yesterday that being trapped in a musical would be hell, but Paul hadn’t had a choice in the matter.

His mind turned to his mark. There was no doubt in his mind that it referred to this situation. It was a jagged musical note, after all. As Paul thought about it, the zig-zag pattern of the stem looked like lightning, which reminded him of last night’s storm – the one that had been raging when the meteor had crashed into the Starlight Theater.

Paul had always been unnerved by the final shape his mark took. When he first showed it to his mother, she had told him it looked “rock and roll”. She had stuck out her tongue and gestured with bull horns. He could tell she had just said that to make him feel better, but the mark still made him feel wary. He would have preferred something flowery or sappy that the men in the romance movies complained about. Instead, he had a mark that told him that meeting his soulmate wouldn’t be the simple or sweet affair the movies promised.

But how was Paul supposed to find his soulmate during the apocalypse? That sounded way more like his typical luck than what he’d originally expected, which was getting a soulmate during a normal circumstance. He didn’t think it was a common occurrence for marked people to meet their soulmates during life-or-death scenarios like this, but if any event was going be “significant” enough to be worthy of a mark, this was damn well it.

For the first time in his life, he felt glad that his mother had died six years ago, if only just because he never would have wanted her to experience this. His mother had been Paul’s only family, and when she went into cardiac arrest, he had been crushed. She’d been at work when it happened, and the ambulance her coworkers had called had not gotten to the daycare in time. One day she had been there, the next she was gone. He’d cried enough tears over her gravestone to fill Lake Erie twice over. About how he still needed her. About how he wished he’d told her he loved her more. About how he wished he could have said goodbye.

The funeral had been small. His mother hadn’t been a social butterfly, but the people who really knew her clearly loved her. They had said so many lovely things that Paul hadn’t had the bravery to say. He’d remained mostly silent. He worried that if he started talking, he wouldn’t stop until he was a weeping mess next to her casket. Because even then, he wouldn’t have said enough about what a wonderful mother she had been. She had been his only friend throughout his childhood. He had been so troubled, and she had stood by him. She did everything in her power to help him, to give him every opportunity. He could offhandedly think of dozens of occasions where even the littlest thing she’d done had helped him immensely. And she did it all on her own. She was the strongest and kindest person he had ever known.

He remembered how excited she had been to meet his soulmate. And she had never gotten to.

Paul glanced at Emma. It had to be her. He’d known his coworkers for years, if it were one of them, something should have happened by now. He knew it wasn’t Hidgens. Paul had only known him for about ten minutes, but in that time, he had made Paul so uncomfortable he didn’t think it could ever be fully reversed.

Besides, he had a connection with Emma. In a rare streak of boldness, he had not only talked to her yesterday, but had flirted with her. And she had _flirted back_. He had gotten her name, and if the world hadn’t fallen to shit, it might not have been long before he had gotten her number. They could have texted back and forth. Sent each other silly gifs. They could have gone out for lunch and talked about each other. Paul would have made some pathetic attempts at jokes that wouldn’t land right because he was so nervous. Emma would probably laugh at him for it, but there would be no bite behind it. Her smile would ease his nerves. They would have agreed to meet up again. Emma would bring up the marks. They would see each other’s matching wrists and smile and he’d kiss her. The kiss would be amazing. They’d smile at each other and never stop smiling.

But now all of that was gone. Because of a meteor that made people sing and dance and kill each other.

Speaking of killing each other, Bill and Ted had started to argue and threaten to hurt each other. Bill, because he was maybe the sweetest man in Hatchetfield, couldn’t even threaten Ted right, and Ted had started to mercilessly make fun of Bill for it.

“Alright, then, let’s see it, huh?” Ted taunted as he rose from his seat. “Kick my head! Come on, karate champ, I want to see you kick above your waist! Show me that roundhouse! Show me that sweeping crane kick that your kung fu master taught you!”

Bill looked mildly angry, which was the angriest Paul had seen Bill in the eight years they’d known each other. And Ted was being way more confrontational than normal. Paul put himself between his coworkers.

“Okay, you two, calm down!” Paul said with his most authoritative voice. “Ted, Bill is not going to kick your head.”

“Why not?” Ted asked, turning his vitriol to Paul. “It’s the most vulnerable part of the body! That’s what Sensei Bill taught me.”

“Okay, it was a dumb threat! Stop rubbing it in. I’m sure if he could do it over again, he’d say ass.”

“Uh-uh, uh-uh!” Ted drawled obnoxiously. “If you wanna kill a snake, what do you do, huh? You cut off its head! Where does the fish rot from? The head! Take out the head, and the whole thing goes down! That’s why a fisherman always goes for” Ted tensed the hand not holding the bottle of bourbon. “the head!”

Ted tried to karate chop Bill’s face, but Bill slapped Ted’s hand away before it could connect. Ted whined and cradled his hand to his chest as he sank to his knees.

Paul had had enough of Ted’s nonsense. “Give me that!” Paul wrestled the bourbon away from Ted. He stepped away and looked sternly down at his coworker. “This is supposed to relax us, not make us kill each other!”

Ted just glared up at Paul from his place on the floor. Paul sighed and handed the bourbon to Bill, silently asking him to put it away. Was this how Ted handled a crisis? By getting drunk and being antagonistic? If Ted kept acting like this, he was going to get someone killed. Probably Paul, based on how things were going so far.

He looked back over at Emma. She looked like she hadn’t paid any attention to what had just happened. Like she was so drained that nothing else could register. Paul thought she looked like she needed company, even if that company didn’t say anything. Sometimes, Paul found, just having someone be there could work wonders in recharging after a stressful situation.

Emma didn’t look at him as he sat down cross-legged next to her, and she spoke almost to herself.

“Why did I come back here?”

Paul wasn’t sure what she was referring to. The bar? The bunker? All Paul knew was that whenever he saw her looking sad, angry, or stressed, he wanted to help her. That was unusual for him; Paul wasn’t one of those men who had to fix everything. He was much more of a mind-your-own-damn-business kind of guy. But something about Emma made him want to help her whenever he thought she needed it. Maybe a bit of light humor could help lift her spirits?

“To, uh…drink?”

Emma smiled at the half-joke, and Paul remembered why he always wanted to help her. Seeing her smile made his heart swell in his chest. It made his palms clammy. It made his muscles relax. It set his mind at ease. He loved her smile.

“Back to Hatchetfield,” she corrected. “I spent the first 18 years of my life trying to get out of this place. I should have just stayed in Guatemala. I mean, they’ve got volcanoes and coatimundis everywhere, but it sure beats this shithole.” She gestured to the room, but Paul thought she meant the town. Or the situation? Either way.

“What’s a coatimundi?”

“It’s like a little raccoon thing. They get into shit, people hate them, but at least they don’t sing and dance.” She grinned and sent him a finger gun.

“So is that what drove you back to Hatchetfield? Coatimundis up in your shit?” Humor worked before, maybe it would work again.

Emma chuckled. “Uh, no. It was my sister. Jane. She was the good one. She had this Lisa Frank binder when she was little where she mapped out her entire life, and I swear to god, she stuck to it. Bullet point by bullet point. It was like – job, husband, house, kid. And, you know, when one sister is so on top of her game, it kind of demands the other be a total fuck up, right?”

Emma didn’t immediately continue talking, so Paul thought that meant she wanted him to answer. “What is yin without yang?”

“That’s what I’m saying.” Paul could tell she just needed someone to listen to her right now, and he was happy to do that for her.

“Yeah, she was off doing life, and I was doing…something else. Backpacking, mostly. And she would call me and invite me home for the big events. You know, weddings, baby showers, and I’d always say ‘Sorry, I’ll catch the next one.’” Emma paused, brow furrowed down at her lap. “Then when I got the invitation to her funeral, I was like ‘Oh. There won’t be a next one.’”

Paul’s heart plummeted to his feet. She had lost her sister. He knew what it was like to lose a loved one, but sister had to be different from mom. Emma’s sister had died so much younger than Paul’s mother had, and she’d left so much more unfinished. Paul had also had the good fortune of good last words.

He was moving a pottery wheel she had bought from her car into her basement the day before she passed. She had wanted to try pottery, she bought the necessities and asked him if he could bring it into the house for her. He’d agreed, because of course he had. His mom had never asked for much; she was fiercely independent about most things. She’d even said so that day. That she would have done it herself, but she really didn’t want to have to call off work because she had thrown out her back.

So, Paul had come by after work and arranged her pottery station, and that had been it, for the most part. They made a little small talk afterwards, then he went home, with a kiss to her cheek and a casual “Love you, Mom.”

He always wished he’d said it more, but he was so relieved he’d said it then.

Emma, on the other hand, likely wasn’t so lucky. She had a lot of open ends with her sister. A lot of should-haves and what-ifs. A lot of regret. Even though Paul had experienced loss, he didn’t know what Emma was going through. A heavy “I’m so sorry” was the best he could offer.

One corner of Emma’s mouth tugged upward weakly. “Hey, you didn’t crash into her car. Anyway, it’s weird – growing up in someone else’s shadow. Because then, when they’re gone, the light shines on your life for the first time, and it does not look good. So, there I was: thirty, with no roots anywhere, except Hatchetfield. So, then I thought, well, I’m going to make something of myself, do something Jane would be proud of: enroll in community college, study botany. I’m going to start a pot farm.”

That last bit threw Paul for a loop. “Oh. Did…your sister smoke a lot of pot?” he stuttered out.

“No, but weed is the future. It’s going to be legal nationwide soon.” She put an imaginary blunt to her lips with a wry grin. Then her face crumbled. “ Not that it matters anymore. Man, my whole life my one goal was to avoid dying in Hatchetfield, and here we are.”

“Hey, it could be worse,” he said. She looked at him skeptically. “You could be dying in Clivesdale.”

Emma’s head shot down to her feet as she doubled over sitting down. She was genuinely laughing this time. The rivalry between the neighboring cities was always good for a laugh. When her head came back up, she had a very serious look on her face.

“Fuck Clivesdale.”

“Fuck ‘em.” Paul agreed. He maintained a serious face to continue the joke. Emma didn’t laugh then, either, but when he glanced over at her he saw mirth dance in her eyes, and he could feel his heartbeat hammering.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been here my whole life. Born and bred.” The farthest he’d gotten from Hatchetfield had been U of M to get his bachelor’s. And he’d come straight back. A far cry from backpacking in Central America for a decade. Paul became suddenly aware of how boring he was. How was he supposed to be this girl’s soulmate? She’d want to go places, do things, rightfully. And he’d hesitate. Was he wrong about her? Was the mark wrong?

As his brain agonized over that, it influenced his mouth as he continued. “I never wanted to leave.” He sent her a significant look. “Still don’t.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, like she had at Beanies yesterday – God, was that yesterday? It felt like years ago – like she was considering him. He wondered what it was she was looking for, and what she saw. “Hey, we’re the same age. How come I never knew you in high school?”

“You probably went to Hatchetfield High. I went Sycamore.” Maybe it was better she hadn’t known him in school. He had been an absolute mess for his entire life up until he had graduated college.

“Fucking Timberwolves!” She slapped his arm playfully. “We hated you guys!”

“We hated ourselves!” he said, smiling.

They laughed together, and it was only a little awkward, which, for him, was a win.

“So,” he started. “back at Beanies, you said you were in your high school production of Brigadoon?”

“Aye, I was Bonnie Jean,” she said with a heavy Scottish accent.

“That was 2003, right?” She nodded. “I actually saw you in Brigadoon.”

“No shit!”

“Yes, shit!” She smiled at that. “Yeah, we didn’t have a theater program at our school, so I guess to make us feel like crap, they bussed us over to see your show. It was the first musical I ever saw.” His brows wrinkled. “I hated it. That’s probably the start of my whole thing. You’re the reason I don’t like musicals.”

She huffed a shocked laugh at the coincidence. “Wow, that’s, like, your origin story.”

“Yeah.”

“So, I guess that means I’m the supervillain,” she said. He wasn’t sure whether or not she was joking, so he smiled warmly at her.

“I don’t think of you like that at all, Emma.”

She smiled at him again, this time looking a little…surprised? He wasn’t sure what that meant, but he felt like it was good.

Emma looked back down at her feet and toyed with the floor. “Listen, um, Paul –”

Whatever she had been about to say was cut off by the door to the bar slamming against the wall. All four of them whipped around to see Charlotte enter the room, her intestines electric blue hanging out of the middle of her cat sweater. They were the same color as her husband’s brain, which was just visible from where he stood behind Charlotte. Fear tried to pluck Paul’s heart from his chest like an apple from a tree.

“It is time…” Charlotte said ominously, eyes flashing that unnatural blue as she pointed at Paul and Emma.

“ _TO DIEEEEEEEE_!”

Charlotte erupted into a viscous belt as Sam danced behind her. They began singing a song about killing the people in the room and chasing them around as best they could while also performing the choreography. The lyrics were as haunting and gory as the image Charlotte was cutting. It was one thing to watch people he didn’t really know sing and dance around. It was entirely different to watch someone he considered a friend threaten to kill him with her guts spilling out and swinging around. Paul had to hold back the bile rising in his throat.

When Charlotte started to slowly get closer, he felt Emma reach out and grab his arm. He spared a glance down at her. She looked as terrified as he felt. That instinct he had with her kicked in again. He tugged her toward him minutely. Contact with her centered him just a bit. Every time he moved to evade Charlotte or Sam, he brought her with him.

Charlotte and Sam eventually closed in on Ted started to beat the shit out of him. Paul was running over all of the things in the bar, looking for something to use as a distraction to escape, when a gunshot tore through the air. Paul’s heart popped like a balloon as Sam crumpled to the ground.


	5. Off-Broadway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma gets an exclusive first look at an original new show by a local rising star.

Emma came to consciousness tied to a chair. Her day had already been maybe the worst in human history, so why not be drugged and tied up? Sure.

She felt hands brush against hers as someone else came to behind her. They were similarly bound, if she had to guess, and they were moaning. As the seconds passed, she started to remember what had gotten her to this position.

After Professor Hidgens had shot down Charlotte and her husband – Emma wasn’t good with names – he had explained the aliens to them. Apparently, that motherfucking meteor was actually a hive mind bent on infecting the entire planet, and the blue shit was just the way the infection was spread. Before they’d been able to think too hard about that, though, Bill had gotten a call from his daughter, who was trapped in Hatchetfield High with a bunch of infected students. Ted had told Bill to leave his daughter for dead, which – no, of course he wasn’t going to do that. Then, Ted had tried to get Paul to side with him, and for a minute, Paul was silent. For those few seconds, Emma had been worried Paul was actually going to agree with Ted. But then, he offered to go with Bill to save his daughter.

Emma had been surprised by his sudden boldness. Nothing about Paul screamed “hero”. He was awkward, nervous, and a bit timid, but he was really kind. Genuine in a way Hatchetfield natives mostly weren’t. She had really seen that in him when they’d talked before Charlotte had burst in. Well, she had talked. He’d mostly listened. Another thing he was good at when most of Hatchetfield wasn’t. Every time she looked over at him while she’d rambled on about her sister, he’d been engaged and empathetic, and that was refreshing.

For a split second, before he realized she was looking at him, he had instead looked soft and adoring. He probably hadn’t even noticed he was doing it, but she saw. Sure, he had been downright manic back at Beanies, but she saw now that it had been justified. The man he’d been in the bunker, the man he’d been yesterday, the man who volunteered to help a coworker save his daughter from very deadly situation – that was the man he really was.

And that man – Paul – was her soulmate.

Emma had no doubts. Paul was not good at keeping secrets. She’d suspected that he had feelings for her pretty much since the first time she had served him at Beanies. The tip thing yesterday had been the nail in the coffin. Really, did he actually think “some things are worth it” was subtle? And her mark was just as obvious. A zig-zaggy musical note could potentially represent a lot of things, but if one of those things is “the apocalypse that robs humanity of free will and individualism and also turns the world into a musical”, there was no question. It was happening now, and the person she was being drawn to was Paul.

The epiphany was slow-coming, but a part of her knew as soon as he took the first steps to leave the bunker and brave hell. She hadn’t meant to stop Paul before he could leave, but that’s what she did. She practically begged him to stay alive while cupping his face – which was very high up – in her hands. She now understood why she did those things, and she understood why his response of “I will never be in a fucking musical” had comforted her as much as it had.

She had felt like a military wife as she stared into the microscope at the blue shit in Hidgens’ lab, waiting for her brave man to come home, hoping he didn’t die before he could. Emma had never thought she’d find herself in this position, and the lack of control she had over it made her itchy. She felt new sympathy for Jane.

She’d estimated that Paul and Bill could be back in twenty minutes if they hauled ass. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty, then forty-five, and they were still gone. Emma could only find herself fearing the worst.

The last thing she remembered was talking to Hidgens about how to stop the aliens. She had felt like she had maybe gotten somewhere when Hidgens had said her theory would “never leave this room”. Hidgens had always had a flare for the dramatic – Emma wouldn’t have been surprised if he carried a pocketful of glitter in anticipation of a grand entrance – but that was ominous as fuck. She turned to ask him what the hell he meant by that when her vision went dark.

So now she was tied to a chair, and her fellow captor was presumably Ted, who had stayed behind after Paul and Bill left. He sure moaned like Ted. She bashed her shoulder into his back to try and wake him up faster. She felt him perk up behind her.

Emma didn’t recognize the room she was in, but she was pretty sure it was Hidgens’ basement. Cement floor and walls, a lightbulb on a cord, no furniture. The only other thing in the room was concealed by a white sheet. It had a rectangular shape and a flat surface. It looked like it was something on a stand about three feet high.

Professor Hidgens stepped out of the shadows. “So. You’re finally awake.”

Right. Emma had been drugged by Hidgens. He’d been babbling about the aliens bringing about world peace or some shit. Hidgens had been so scarily accurate about what was happening outside Emma had almost forgotten that he was a little off his rocker. She was already fearing the worst.

“Professor, what are you doing?”

The professor’s eyes bulged out so wide they looked like they would roll out of his head. “Exactly what needs to be done.” He turned away from her and Ted. “Alexa!”

Somewhere, an Amazon Alexa dinged its attention. “Open the gates! Turn off the fences! Shut it all down!”

Emma started to panic. She wriggled in her restraints and felt Ted do the same. “But Professor, those are the only things protecting us!”

“Protecting us from what, Emma?” he shouted. Emma could hear the groan of the gates opening and the hiss of the mechanism electrifying the fences shutting off. “From the end of the world? What’s protecting us from nuclear holocaust? Climate change? Overpopulation?”

Hidgens was flailing his arms about as he spoke, and now he was knelt in front of Emma, eye twitching as he bored a hole into the floor with his stare.

“Emma,” he muttered inches from her face. “The world was already doomed. Not by them. But by us. I was trying to save something that could not be saved.”

Hidgens stood. Emma could no longer see his face, but the tone of his voice had changed. He sounded…hopeful? “Until now.”

He stepped away from Emma and continued rambling. “But before we can be reborn into a better world, first,” he turned back to her solemnly “we must say our goodbyes.”

Emma’s heart rate jumped, and she struggled harder at her restraints. No, no, no, this could not be happening! Hidgens had been preparing to survive the apocalypse for decades, his house should have been the safest in Hatchetfield! Hidgens liked Emma, and now he was throwing her out to the wolves.

She and Ted started quietly begging Hidgens to reconsider, but he ignored their pleas. Instead, he started going off about how much he loved his Alexa, and if Emma hadn’t thought he was nuts before, she sure did now. She didn’t even have it in her to be mad that he cared more about a mass-produced AI than a real person who bought him groceries once. She was mostly grossed out.

He tried to get the Alexa to self-destruct. He’d looked confused when it, obviously, did not explode.

“Uh,” Emma chimed in, “I don’t think it can do that, Professor.”

Apparently, he didn’t care that much about Alexa because it was only five seconds later that he threw it against the wall, shattering it.

Ted resumed begging to let them go, more loudly this time, and Hidgens whipped around to face them.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Ted,” he said, the madness of his logic finally seeping into his voice. “Don’t you two see that in order for humanity to survive,” he took one of their shoulders in each hand in a crunching grip. “it must evolve. That’s what this visitor from the stars has brought us: salvation! We must join them. This is our second chance.”

His eyes fixed onto the thing under the sheet. “My second chance.”

As Hidgens crept toward the covered object, Emma attempted to reason with him. He was being rash. Maybe he just hadn’t thought about all the implications, like Paul had said.

“Professor, think about what you’re doing!”

“Emma,” he choked out. “Did you know that long before I was a biologist, I had a much truer and deeper passion?”

As he spoke, Emma started to recognize the shape under the sheet. Oh, no. No, no, no…

“Yes,” Hidgens breathed. “My first love was, and always will be…” He ripped the sheet off to reveal an electric piano. “Musical theatre!”

Emma took a deep breath. “Oh…god, no.”

“This guy’s fucking nuts!” Ted yelled, as if that weren’t fucking obvious already.

“After examining that creature you once called Charlotte, I made a fascinating discovery. These aliens, they possess a highly specialized gland that allows them to communicate through rhythmic frequencies. They’re drawn to music!”

He caressed the keyboard. “Like a moth to the flame.”

“No! Don’t you do it, don’t you fucking do it!” Ted begged

“No, please, Professor, don’t!” Emma begged simultaneously.

“This is humanity’s eleventh hour,” Hidgens said as he draped himself into the chair behind the keyboard with a wicked grin. “and I’ve prepared something for the occasion.”

As Hidgens worked his fingers up the keys on the keyboard and began singing of his own free will, Emma abandoned all attempts at getting out of her bonds. They were zip ties. It wasn’t like she had any actual chance of breaking free. She briefly considered the possibility that Ted carried a pocketknife and the logistics of trying to free each other with their hands behind their backs. The chances for success were low, and the chances for injury were high.

This was it, Emma thought. This was how she was going to fucking die: brutally murdered while strapped to a chair by a singing fucking alien wearing human skin mere hours after she found her soulmate. If that wasn’t a perfect representation of her luck in life so far. Emma had been the one to suggest hiding out with Hidgens, and now he was the reason they were going to die. She had a lot of shitty luck in her life, but none of it hadn’t been self-inflicted. Usually, when something went horribly wrong in her life, it was either because of her short temper or her tendency to push people away. Missing out on all of those years with her sister had been a combination of both. Her last conversation with Jane in person had ended in shouting, and that had been the last in-person conversation because Emma had been too afraid to come back to Hatchetfield to face her again. What was really depressing, though, was that she thought she had been turning that around, at least a bit. Complaining to Paul, when he had just been that nice customer who order black coffee every day, bringing Hidgens groceries, had been her way of practicing being more open to people. She wanted to get better at being open and dependable so she could be a better aunt.

But no, after she had just started trying to be a better person, after thirty years, she was going to have her guts ripped out for her efforts. If that wasn’t just the biggest fuck-you from the universe.

And, God, there was Paul. She had told him not to get himself killed while he ventured outside the fortress. Where was he, anyway? Something had obviously gone wrong on his end because he should have been back by now with Bill and his daughter. Was he dead already? Chances were he was. Ambushed by some chorus line, taken out by some impostor. Hell, maybe Ted had been right, and Bill’s daughter was dead on arrival and she had been the one kill them both. As Hidgens began dancing along to his original song – which was more than a bit self-serving in Emma’s opinion – she ran through dozens of ways her pre-destined Mr. Right could have been killed by an extraterrestrial doomsday straight out of his nightmares before they ever had a chance to even fucking hold hands.

But there was still the chance he wasn’t dead. Maybe they’d had to hide out somewhere while waiting for a big group of body-snatchers to pass by. Maybe they’d had to take a longer route back. The fact was she had no clue what was happening with Paul, but it probably didn’t matter. Even if he was alive and heading back to the fortress at that exact moment, it wouldn’t matter. She was going to be the one who was dead soon.

It was only a matter of minutes before the aliens got there.

Hidgens was talking about a musical he had been writing. Knowing Hidgens, it was probably shit.

“Do you mind if I give you the pitch?” he asked precociously.

If Emma was going to die, she did not want it to be to the soundtrack of Hidgens’ garbage musical. “Professor, we don’t –”

“Fucking go for it,” said Ted, scooting his chair around so he was sitting next to Emma. He looked genuinely excited to listen to that crap. What the fuck?

“It’s called… Workin’ Boys: A New Musical!”

And that was where Emma tuned back out. That title alone was enough to confirm that Hidgens’ musical a fat load of horseshit.

God, what was even the point? Why did the universe or God or whoever give her a soulmate if she was going to die before she could even really meet him?

What did she even know about Paul? He liked black coffee, he had a boring office job, he didn’t like musicals, he went to Sycamore. He was a shitty flirt. He was a great listener. She had a lot of little pieces, but she was missing so many substantial ones. What was his childhood like? What kind of family did he have? What was he like in college? What did he actually do at his job?

So many things she could have gotten at least some idea about if they had just had a normal first date. She found herself mourning the loss of it. It probably wouldn’t have been that bad. Sure, Paul would have probably found a million ways to botch it. He’d been so awkward around her at Beanies, and a real date would have been way worse. But…it would have been cute.

As Hidgens began acting out a fake phone call, Emma resigned herself to death. He had been singing for about two whole minutes now. No doubt the alien motherfuckers were practically on top of them by now. They were as good as dead.

Really, though, Hatchetfield was pretty much toast the minute that meteor crashed into the Starlight. Nora had probably already been gone when she had texted Emma at 4 o’clock this morning. How many others had been infected by then? And then, once they had Nora, how many people had they been able to infect using the coffee? Probably a ton. And apparently Paul’s boss had been picking people off one by one. All of downtown had been taken out by nine. Emma, Paul, and his coworkers had likely been some of the last survivors by the time they had gotten to Hidgens. It would have just been a waiting game; hiding out until the aliens finally got to them or until resources ran out.

Hatchetfield didn’t have any defenses against a fucking zombie apocalypse. They were just an island town in Lake Erie. Only Hidgens had been prepared to survive, and no one had been prepared to fight back.

“Hey, Henry,” drawled an unfamiliar voice from the shadows by the keyboard. A man in a letterman jacket Emma did not recognize emerged, clearly the source of the voice, eyes flashing blue as he grinned hungrily at Hidgens.

Hidgens whipped around to look. “Greg! Is it really you?”

Emma’s mouth had dropped to her chest. “No, Professor, that’s not Greg!”

“Been a long time,” said Obviously-Not-Greg as he stepped closer to Hidgens.

“Hey, boys,” growled another unfamiliar voice from behind Emma and Ted. “You ready to toss around that pigskin?”

A man in a tan leather jacket with glowing eyes walked up to Hidgens’ other side.

“Stu!” cried Hidgens. “You haven’t aged a day! Can it be five o’clock already? It must be!”

The two new men began singing and dancing along to Hidgens’ shitty fucking musical, and Emma couldn’t imagine a worse way to go.

She only hoped she might be able to see Jane on the other side.

For some reason, the two aliens who had invaded the fortress decided to run giddily out of the basement arm-in-arm with Hidgens instead of killing him on the spot.  
Whatever that meant, Emma didn’t think it could be good.

As they left, Emma heard more footsteps come from behind her. Her arms fought more at their restraints in panic. Ted pleaded with God for salvation.

The footsteps stopped just behind them, and she heard the click of a pocketknife being unsheathed.

“It’s okay, guys, I’m here!” cried a very familiar voice breathlessly.

“Paul!” Emma cried, nearly sobbing. The tidal wave of relief that swept her when she saw Paul knelt at her wrists cutting open the zip ties was overwhelming. Being freed, escaping the aliens, seeing him alive.

Paul finished breaking Emma’s zip ties and shushed the both of them. “We’ve got to get out of here while they’re distracted!” he said as he began work on Ted.

Only a couple of seconds later, Paul and Emma, with Ted as a newly-installed third wheel, were once again fleeing the murderous singing aliens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do I love SSN? Yes. Do I regret making Emma trash it so bad? Not at all.


	6. Into the Lion's Den

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paul is given a way out for himself and Emma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I took the liberty of filling in a few gaps. Hopefully it makes sense. 
> 
> Warning for a small bit of non-canon gore.

Of all of the things Paul hadn’t expected to do today, crash-landing in Oakleigh Park from hundreds of feet in the air was by far the strangest.

He found himself weirdly capable of taking this whole apocalypse deal in stride. Once he and Emma had escaped from Beanies, he’d been mostly able to get a grip on his anxiety – which was definitely a first – and channel it into something productive. On the way to Hatchetfield High, he wondered if that was because everyone was worried all the time now, and only he was used to that sensation. Maybe he wasn’t calm, just calm by comparison. That much, at least, made sense.

But maybe there was something overpowering his fear, or just redirecting it. Maybe his general anxiety was morphed into a fear for the lives of his friends, fear for Emma’s life. Maybe that had been fear enough to activate his well-used flight instinct. Whatever the cause, Paul seemed to be more adept at surviving this ordeal than nearly anyone else.

He had definitely been better adjusted than Bill, but Paul couldn’t find it in himself to blame Bill for that. Bill was taking responsibility for the dangerous situation Alice was in, and it made sense that that would freak him out. Finding Alice dead, as Ted predicted, and then listening to the alien piloting Alice confirm every last one of Bill’s worst fears about their relationship – it had been too much for him.

Paul had tried to help Bill. He had tried to drag him away once Alice started singing. He had wrestled the shotgun out of his hands when he had positioned the barrel under his chin. He had tried to talk him down from the verge of suicide.

“Hey, look at me,” Paul had said in his most soothing voice. “You’re my best friend. I’m not going to let you die.”

Ironic last words for Bill to hear.

While he made his way back to Hidgens’ fortress alone, Paul did his best not to think about how Bill might still be alive if he had not thrown the shotgun on the ground, practically at Alice’s feet, after he got it from Bill. Instead, he attempted to focus on the chopper.

The government getting involved in this catastrophe had been a surprise to Paul – at least, them getting involved so quickly. Waking up in a little white tent on the edge of town after being knocked out by the butt of an army man’s gun was less of a surprise.

Shortly after waking, Paul had been introduced to a General John McNamara. The man was strange, for a general. He had a long ponytail and spoke with a drawl Paul couldn’t place. He smoked cigarettes. He claimed to be from “Special Unit PEIP”. When Paul asked what that was, all General McNamara did was flatly crack a joke. He then frightened Paul by threatening his life in the same flat, casual tone.

He then went on about a higher law than the government that guided his actions and told Paul about the helicopter. If he could just make it to Oakleigh Park by eleven o’clock, he could board the escape copter and finally – _finally_ – bid this hellscape goodbye.

Paul had recounted all of this to Emma and Ted as they snuck out of Hidgens’ fortress. He carefully left out the last part of his exchange with General McNamara, where McNamara was only allowing Emma to tag along because Paul had confessed he had feelings for her. Paul did not consider that a relevant detail. Besides, the driver of the helicopter should be helping any survivors to escape.

Looking down at McNamara’s watch – apparently, General McNamara had a thing against cellphones, because Paul’s was now in pieces in the corner of that PEIP tent where he had thrown it in a fit of righteousness– the time had been 10:52 pm. They would be able to make it to Oakleigh Park, if they hurried.

So, of course, Ted had chosen that moment for a heart-to-heart. All attempts made by Paul and Emma to get him to shelve it were in vain. As a consequence, one of the aliens grabbed Paul from behind. As he was dragged away, he saw Ted and Emma shouting at each other, Ted holding the handgun General McNamara had given him. How had Ted gotten that? After a few seconds, he had seen Emma come running after him, and he saw Ted run the opposite direction toward Oakleigh Park. Somewhere deep in the back of Paul’s mind, he’d thought that this was very typical of Ted.

Paul had struggled to free himself from the alien grasping his shoulders. He had been able to tell from the way it was holding him that he’d had the size advantage on it by at least a couple inches, but it had inhuman strength. The more Paul bucked against it, the tighter its grip got until he felt like his shoulders were being crushed. He had distantly remembered that woman from Greenpeace this morning. When she had taken his hand during that song on the street, her grip was so tight he’d nearly screamed.

He saw Emma duck into a nearby alleyway and come back out with a trashcan lid. She sprinted toward them with the lid raised above her head. Once she was only a few feet from Paul and his captor, she leaped into the air with the lid extended. Paul ducked. The alien had been too busy singing whatever dumb song they had been singing back at the fortress to notice Emma flying through the air toward it. The lid clanged against its head loudly, and Paul felt it loosen its hold on his shoulders. Paul seized the opportunity Emma had given him and elbowed it in the nose. It released Paul completely, hands flying to the newly-bleeding nose. At least, it looked like it was bleeding. The stuff leaking out from its fingers was the same electric blue as everything else inside the aliens.

Emma sent it stumbling backward with a swift kick to its stomach. Then, they both ran as quickly as they could away from it toward Oakleigh Park. Emma wrapped her hand around his wrist while they ran. Paul grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled her in step with him.

They got to Oakleigh Park at 10:54 pm. Several PEIP agents had been marching in a circular formation around the park. Their footsteps pounded in rhythm with the wordless song they all sung. General McNamara had been amongst them, singing about America being great, though it hadn’t felt that way for Paul at that moment. Ted had been in their ranks, too, easy to spot in his civilian clothes in a sea of black SWAT-style uniforms.

Almost as soon as they had gotten there, the aliens had swiftly turned on a heel and faced them.

“Sir, it’s Paul,” they’d chorused, pointing square at him.

Paul had learned back at the high school that this hive mind had it out for him. It had taken notice of how many times he escaped from its clutches and it was not happy. It couldn’t be a good sign that it had taken the time to learn his name. If what Hidgens had said back at the fortress was true, the more times he got away from the aliens, the more violent and ruthless its next attempt would be. In the park, he and Emma had stood unarmed against about a dozen of them, all packing heat, even Ted.

The helicopter had been parked on the opposite side of the park. Paul and Emma had had to get through the alien formation to get to it.

They nearly hadn’t made it. Bobbing through the singing militia’s interlocking patterns without getting grabbed was tricky. Paul had backed into General McNamara while looking for Emma. The thing controlling McNamara held him in a chokehold and lifted him a foot off the ground. He would have ben a goner if Emma hadn’t wrestled a gun away from the empty husk of Ted and shot the former general in the shoulder. That had disoriented it enough that Paul and Emma were able to make their escape to the chopper.

Emma had been so relieved that they had escaped Hatchetfield that she hadn’t put on her seatbelt before the pilot started sing the tip song from Beanies.

On instinct, Paul had kicked the gun out of the hands of what used to be the lazy Beanies barista, just in time for the round she fired off to pierce the roof and mess with the rotor.

Everything happened in a blur. Sirens blared, wind rushed, and they were hurtling toward the ground. Somewhere during their dive downward, he saw Emma be yanked out of the helicopter.

Paul awoke from unconsciousness hanging limply from his seat, the seatbelts holding him up.

“Emma!” he called out instinctively.

A cursory look at the wreckage from inside the helicopter showed no signs of Emma or the alien pilot. Worry scratched at Paul’s throat. He undid the seatbelts with trembling fingers and dropped the two feet to the ground.

Clambering out from the demolished chopper, he surveyed the scene. They were back in Oakleigh Park, but the alien squadron that had been here before was nowhere to be seen. The nose of the helicopter was crunched into the grass, the tail in the air. A twisting trail of upturned sod told him the helicopter had bounced a couple times on impact and slid into its final position. The rod of the main propeller had bent forty-five degrees, and the blades were contorted in many places. One of them had skewered the pilot, dug first through its chest and then into the dirt. Paul swallowed back bile at the gory image.

Still no sign of Emma. He called out to her again, and this time, he heard her voice groan loudly behind him.

He turned and saw her scoot toward him, using her arms and hips to drag her left leg limply behind. Paul’s eye’s widened. A rebar had embedded itself in her left thigh. About four inches of metal pipe stuck out of both sides, blood surrounding the entrance and exit, making them indistinguishable.

He sprinted to her side, Emma still groaning in pain. “Oh, god, Emma, your leg!”

“Fuck!” Emma yelled, the curse turning into another groan.

“Emma,” he stuttered as he lowered himself to the ground next to her. “I hate to say this right now, but this is what seatbelts are for.”

“Shit!” she growled, this curse getting the same treatment as the last. As worried as he was about her leg, they both had bigger problems. “Emma, we’re still in Hatchetfield. We need to get to the shore. We need to find a boat or something.” He tried to pick her up to carry her to the shore, but as soon as he touched her leg, she screamed a blood-curdling scream. Paul’s hands flew off of her, but she scooted one scoot closer to him, practically in his lap. He put on hand gently on her arm.

“Paul, I can’t make it.” Her speech was cracked with severe pain. “I’m not getting off the island.”

Paul felt like his heart was being dropped into a woodchipper. “No, but Emma, those-those things are going to find us…”

“You gotta fucking kill them before they do,” she said forcefully. “The meteor… You gotta destroy the meteor, Paul. It’s like your friend said. You know, the hive mind?”

“Which friend?” he asked, hoping for clarification. His mind was foggy and misfiring from shock. He wasn’t sure what she meant. “Bill? Ted? Charlotte?”

“I don’t know your friends’ fucking names!” she snapped. “’You take the head out, the whole thing goes down’.”

He remembered that. Ted said that back at the fortress. The pieces were clicking into place.

“Okay,” he said, standing. If he was going to take out the meteor, he needed something to take it out with. “Okay.” He looked at the helicopter and saw a belt of grenades splayed out on the ground next to the dead pilot. “Okay.” He knelt down next to the pilot. “So, I just need to” – he picked up the belt – “get to the Starlight Theater” – he secured the grenades around himself – “destroy the meteor” – he walked back toward Emma – “and all these things will just drop dead?”

“Yeah, I sure as shit hope so.”

“Okay. You stay here and try to hang on.” She was in bad shape and bringing her with him into the lion’s den was not only impossible if he couldn’t pick her up, but also a more certain death sentence for her than bleeding out in Oakleigh Park. Leaving her behind in this state was difficult. He wanted nothing more than to be able to call an ambulance for her, to take her to the hospital, but the hospital was downtown, and downtown had been fucked all day. Plus, time was of the essence in trying to destroy the meteor. Its minions had already been targeting him for hours now. As soon as one of them spotted him, they would all be after him. He had to get to the theater as quickly as he could to avoid their attention. It was breaking his heart, but he had to leave Emma behind.

“Hey, Paul,” she said softly, her breathing labored. She scooted even closer to him, and he held his arm under her back. “I know why you came into Beanies all those times instead of just going to Starbucks, and it wasn’t because you liked our shit coffee.” He huffed a half-hearted laugh. “Our coffee was shit,” she groaned. “because we didn’t care.”

Paul tried to shush her. It was clear she was rambling, and it was taking a lot of her energy, and he really needed to leave. But she continued and he couldn’t tear himself away.

“Sometimes we would spit in it. You might have drank my spit, but I didn’t know you back-back then, but I wish I did. Anyway. Paul. If we get through this, I would love to just see a nice, silent movie with you sometime, but in case we don’t…” Her face cleared of all strain and her eyes sparkled as she looked up at him. “…kiss me?”

God, any other day, and Paul would have said yes. There she was, the girl of his dreams, his literal soulmate, probably, asking _him_ to kiss _her_. But also, there she was, severely injured and delirious from a helicopter crash, in the midst of an alien apocalypse, asking him to kiss her, right as he was about to go destroy the source of the nightmare. They had both had a long day of running and fighting. Being ambushed and injured. Many times, he had reached out to her that day, sometimes just to make sure she was okay, but sometimes because he needed something – someone – to hold onto. And she had reached back. She had even reached for him sometimes. But a kiss? He was too emotionally spent for something so overtly romantic like that.

But he looked into her eyes and saw what she was saying. It was more likely than not that she would die here in Oakleigh Park, not because of the aliens, but because of the rebar. And she didn’t want to die without kissing her soulmate, just once.

She’d noticed, too. In spite of all the evidence, he had still been worried he was wrong, but the look in her eyes all but confirmed it. Even if he wanted to say no, and he did, he simply couldn’t.

“Okay,” he choked out. He saw her eyes close and her chin tilt upward as he hesitantly leaned in. He closed his own eyes when he was only seconds away from her lips.

Then, he heard her cough and felt something splash on his face. He instantly pressed his mouth closed and scrunched up his nose. When he blinked open his eyes, he saw a river of blood trailing down her chin and spots of it dotting his cheeks. There were a lot of ways Paul imagined his first kiss going, and there were a lot of ways he imagined it going wrong, but he’d never been so pessimistic to expect this.

“Oh. Emma…” Through his shock and disgust, he couldn’t even finish a thought.

“Oh, yeah, that’s a lot of blood,” she grunted, looking vaguely down at her chin. She gave one more experimental cough before turning back to him. “But… I think that’s all of it so get back on in here.”

She wrapped her fingers loosely around his tie in what he assumed was an attempt to be sexy, but he was only coming in closer on reflex, not because the tie was moving him. Her eyes had grown foggy and her strength was leaving her. She was maybe a minute away from unconsciousness. Both their mouths were covered in blood. The line had to be drawn somewhere.

“No thanks,” Paul said. “No. Sorry.” Her eyes fluttered halfway back open and her hand slid down his tie. “Yeah, you’re right, fuck it,” Emma grumbled. “Get out of here.” She gave his chest a weak pat and began to lower herself into a horizontal position.

“Okay,” he said, standing up. “Bye…” He dragged out his goodbye awkwardly as he left, giving away how weird he felt about… that.

Paul oscillated between fiddling with the grenade belt and tapping his fists together as he made his way toward the Starlight Theater. He could hear the alien ranks ooh-ing to some new song as he skulked in alleyways and hid in shadows. He tried to use the walk to the theater to prepare himself for what he might find there, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about Emma.

He kept remembering good times with her. When they talked and laughed together. When she’d helped him through this crisis without even realizing she was doing it. Maybe it was just the forced closeness brought about by surviving an apocalypse together, but Paul thought he might love her already.

Every moment he had spent with her, she was incredible. She was strong in the face of danger and hardship. She was smart in a pinch. She was funny even when times were tough. She was beautiful even when blood dribbled down her face.

She liked him. In the most general sense. She talked to him and smiled at him. He knew her well enough to know that if she didn’t like him, she wouldn’t have bothered.

She helped him. When they were running away. When he was losing his grip. When he felt insecure.

She made him better. Around her, he felt stronger, smarter, funnier than he ever had. Hell, he was confronting the meteor for her. That was not something he would have thought himself brave enough to do even yesterday. Paul from yesterday would have said “fuck that” and found a new place to hide. Or Paul from yesterday might already have been dead.

But he had survived this long. In no small part because she was there. Because in a crisis, they found each other and helped each other.

And now he was walking to almost certain death. The meteor was bound to be crawling with body-snatchers protecting the mother brain. Now she was lying alone in a park in desperate need of medical attention that she couldn’t get. To him, it almost wasn’t a question of whether or not they would live, but who would die first.

Chances were, he would, but even that thought couldn’t stop him from continuing forward. If he didn’t attack the meteor, no one would. Everyone had been taken down by the aliens, even the military. As far as he knew, he and Emma were the only two survivors left. If he didn’t take out the meteor now, they were both going to die for sure. Either way, he was a dead man, and he’d rather be really dead than a puppet for the meteor.

He thought about her again. He was leaving her behind, maybe for good. What was that going to be like? He thought the whole “loved and lost” thing was bullshit, though maybe it wasn’t as dramatic as that since she didn’t love him. It was one thing to live without your soulmate, he knew. But it was much worse to know you never can. Dying in that theater was going to save her life, and that alone made martyrdom worth it, but it was going to cause her pain, too. That knowledge weighed him down.

He could only hope that she would find happiness without him.

The marquee shone brightly into the night, the words “Mamma Mia!” still displayed. Fragments of upturned wood from the gaping hole in the roof poked out at the top the building. As Paul peered out from an alleyway across the street, he could just make out a faint glow in a familiar blue coming from every crack and crevice in the building. He didn’t see any aliens lurking around, and their song had faded to nothing. That alone made him nervous, but he swallowed the feeling for the time being. Seizing the moment, Paul stepped out into the open with as much purpose as he could muster. He put his hand on the handle to the main entrance and took one last steadying breath before entering the hall of the mountain king.

The lobby was dark and dead. For as musical as the apocalypse had been so far, he couldn’t believe how silent it was. It was unsettling. The only light was moonlight from the windows and the blue glow, stronger in this darkness, emanating from the theater doors. Paul stepped as quietly as he could through the lobby, one hand on his grenade belt. He opened the theater door carefully, keeping alert for any traps or ambushes.

He was met with none. Instead, he just saw the theater. The vaulted ceiling was ornately decorated to resemble a European palace. The ground sloped gently downward toward the stage. The stage itself was still occupied by the disheveled set of Mamma Mia. The theater was packed with red velvet seats lined in a neat, subtle horseshoe configuration. Three skinny aisles segmented them into four blocks. He stood in the center aisle at the back of the room, staring dead-on at the meteor.

It was big, about ten feet all the way around. It was lodged maybe three feet into the stage. Its craggy surface was speckled with hills and dormant geysers radiating blue light. Debris from the roof and the stage surrounded it like a protective fence. Moonlight from the hole in the roof fell upon it like a spotlight.

The air in the theater had a spotty, blue tinge to it. It made everything in the theater, even the seats, look infected.

“The Old Starlight Theater…” Paul murmured to himself. There was still no sign of any alien doppelgangers, which he didn’t like, but he stepped forward anyway. He began removing one of the grenades from the belt around his chest.

“We’ve been waiting for you, Paul…” Bill’s voice drawled from his right. In the aisle over, an alien wearing Bill stalked out of the shadows staring at him with empty eyes illuminated with that unnatural blue.

“Stay back,” he stuttered, his hand tightening around a grenade.

“Watch out, Paul,” Ted’s voice droned from the left aisle. “He might kick your head.”

“And that would be a la dee dah dah dah…” came a woman’s voice from in front of the stage. Looking left, he saw what was once Ted and a woman in a Beanies uniform and a visor, both with the same shining blue eyes that the possessed Bill had. The same blue they had all had.

“Ted,” he exhaled. “Uh, Emma’s boss…”

“That’s right, Paul. All your best friends are here,” intoned the deep voice of Professor Hidgens as the alien piloting him stepped out from the other side of Emma’s boss. He felt fear crackle throughout his body as he was slowly being surrounded. It had known he was coming, and it had prepared for him.

“We’re happy now,” came Mr. Davidson’s voice as it revealed itself from behind the meteor. “We got what we wanted.”

So that was their game, Paul thought. The emotional manipulation. Just like they had done to Bill with Alice. It was going to try to convince him that he wanted to surrender his free will to an alien hivemind so he could sing and dance for the rest of his existence. That was going to be a hard sell, and Paul was not going to make it any easier for it.

“No,” he said firmly. “No, Mr. Davidson didn’t want to be a mindless alien slave. He wanted to be choked out by his wife. While he jerked off!” A strange desire, Paul knew, but his boss had a right to have wants of his own.

He said all of this to the meteor itself, trying to bolster his own confidence before he blew the motherfucker up.

“I’m going to put a stop to all this,” he said as he continued toward the stage, once again starting to remove one of his grenades.

“I thought you didn’t care about saving the planet,” a voice spat from behind him. Two more aliens unfolded themselves from their hiding places underneath some of the seats lining the center aisle. The one that had spoken, controlling the body of the rude Greenpeace girl, walked a few steps toward him. The other, one of the ones he had seen dancing with not-Alice back at the high school, stayed a step behind.

“Back off, Greenpeace girl. I pull this pin and you’re all toast.”

“You wouldn’t do that, Paul,” said Emma’s boss.

“I sure as hell will.” He got halfway down the aisle before another one of them spoke again.

“And what about you?” It was Mr. Davidson. “You’d die, too. Is that what you want?”

The way they all spoke was so unnatural. Even if he closed his eyes, he wouldn’t believe their lies.

Still, he didn’t know how to respond to that. The meteor had no right to his mind or his heart. It had no right to know about the tattoo on his wrist that proclaimed the one thing he would want above all else. If it knew that Emma was his soulmate and that he would happily die to protect her from it, the meteor would only use that against him.

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” was what Paul settled on.

“We think it does, Paul,” came Bill’s voice.

“And we want to hear about it,” came Ted’s.

“In fact,” came Mr. Davidson’s again. “we think there’s a song in you yet!” it snarled.

The bodies all shifted positions until they were standing upright. Paul heard a door slamming shut behind him, and when he looked, he saw the high school girl standing in front of it menacingly. His gut sank as he knew what was about to happen.

He did his best to ignore the singing as he walked the rest of the way down the aisle. Any alien he passed stroked at him uncomfortably and followed him to the stage. Mr. Davidson and Professor Hidgens clamped down on his shoulders. Emma’s boss and the Greenpeace girl played their fingers along his chest. Ted didn’t even touch him, but the tingling that left behind was palpable and wrong. Bill caressed his cheek. As he passed Bill, he stopped himself from reaching out.

More victims emerged from the seats as he approached the meteor. There were dozens of them chorusing its message by the time he got to the stage.

The meteor asked him to tell it what he wanted. It was telling him to give up. The song soon gave way to the aliens just commanding him to let it out. Why did the meteor think just telling Paul to sing would get him to submit? That angle hadn’t worked when it tried that on him that morning.

But something was off. For the first time, Paul could hear, if only faintly, the background music the aliens were singing to. Once he stepped into the moonlight around the meteor, it seemed to morph shape and swim across the stage until it was around him. A new, numb sensation was sweeping his legs as he stood there. The air around him grew bluer. The music got louder. Louder, louder, louder. Crescendoing until –

A break. An open spot for something else. Something new.

Something inside Paul knew what that was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters are getting longer! Thanks for all the kind comments, they mean a lot to me!


	7. No Survivors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There were no survivors of the Hatchetfield Catastrophe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Halfway done, let's goooooo!

Emma fiddled with the straps of the backpack Colonel Schaffer had given her.

In spite of what the nurses had told her, Emma thought it was wrong that she wasn’t even a little bit excited to finally be leaving the Clivesdale hospital. Being bedridden for two weeks had made her antsy. She should be excited about getting out. She should be excited about Denver. She should be excited about the house – _house_ – PEIP was giving her for free.

But she wasn’t. She was just depressed. Numb. She felt like she’d forgotten how to feel, with whatever fucked up sense that made. The nurses insisted it did make sense, and that that reaction was perfectly normal. The way they said it, though, was unconvincing. Pitying, even. Emma didn’t like it.

One of them entered her room and held the door open silently. Emma hopped down from her bed and walked over to the door, staring blankly at the blood that stained her Beanies uniform.

She followed the nurse out to the main hallway, where Colonel Schaffer stood in parade rest.

“How’s that leg doing, Kelly?”

Emma winced at her new alias. “Why’d it have to be Kelly? I liked my old name. Couldn’t you have at least picked something similar, like ‘Emily’ or…that’s all I can think of.”

“That’s a negative, Kelly. You’ll get used to it.” The nurse walked out of the hallway. “In the meantime, we can’t have anyone making any connections between you and Emma Perkins, who perished in the Hatchetfield Catastrophe.”

“Yeah, that was the other thing,” Emma started, mostly as a distraction for herself. “You couldn’t even give me a cool death? Like, ‘Emma Perkins: her flesh melted off while she was shielding children’. You know, something heroic? It was my idea to destroy the meteor, after all.”

“And Uncle Sam is not ungrateful.” Schaffer walked up to Emma. “Here, Kelly. This is for you.

Emma took the manilla folder from Schaffer and glanced inside.

“Inside you’ll find a new passport, social security card, and the deed to a five-acre plot of land in Colorado. Green. Fertile. Hell of a place to grow some cannabis.”

Emma smiled weakly. She hadn’t known they had figured out why she had asked to go to Colorado. Clearly, they had, and they approved. Right on.

She slung the backpack off her shoulder and slipped the dossier inside. “Thanks.”

Schaffer was quiet after that, and Emma, knowing it was her last chance, had to ask.

“Um, Colonel Schaffer? You’re sure there were no other survivors?”

“We’ve been through this, Kelly. There were no other survivors.” They both shot a look to Emma’s exposed wrist.

When Emma had first awoken in the Clivesdale hospital, the first thing she had done was ask about survivors. The doctors explained the whole situation to her.

A secondary PEIP unit had been sent into Hatchetfield after the first one, led by General John McNamara, had gone silent. They dropped down in Oakleigh Park next to the crash site of one of their choppers. Upon quick investigation, both Emma’s unconscious body and the corpse of a civilian in the guise of an agent were found. A couple of lower ranking agents rushed her to the nearest safe hospital while the rest of the team scoped the area. All they found were more bodies littering the streets. Emma’s had been the only one breathing.

Emma impatiently asked what the found at the Starlight. The team had split off to investigate various focal points of downtown Hatchetfield. Schaffer led the group that went to the Starlight. Once there, they found even more bodies and the demolished remains of the meteorite, as PEIP insisted it should be called. No breathers among that crowd, either.

The second thing Emma had done after waking up, was take off her patch. She didn’t see any point in hiding it from the doctors. She had never seen the point in hiding it from anybody. She only did it to get gossipy assholes off her back. Now she didn’t even care about that.

They asked if Paul had been in Hatchetfield during the Catastrophe while pointing at her mark. Emma asked how they knew Paul’s name. They explained that she had muttered it a couple of times while she was out. She didn’t even have it in her to be embarrassed. She told them yes, he was, last she’d seen him, he’d been headed for the theater.

PEIP did a little digging and found a file on a Paul Matthews. He’d been found at the Starlight, close to the wreckage of the meteorite with a PEIP-issued grenade belt around his body. She confirmed that that was him, and PEIP confirmed that Paul hadn’t survived.

Emma hadn’t even been able to cry about that in the two weeks she’d spent in the Clivesdale hospital recovering from emergency surgery. She would have rather balled her eyes out, she thought, if only to feel something. Not crying about it, to Emma, meant that she hadn’t cared about him. But she had. At least, she thought she had.

She remembered Paul, in an attempt to mourn him. She remembered his eyes. How big and blue and beautiful they were. She remembered his smile, bright and genuine. She remembered how just seeing him smile made her smile, too. She remembered his stupid jokes. She remembered how awkward and unfunny they were, but she’d still laughed at them. She remembered his kindness toward her in Beanies and at the fortress. She remembered the way his hand felt in hers as they ran from danger, and how it felt around her arm.

She couldn’t make herself cry, and she realized that was because a part of her was in denial. He couldn’t be dead. He was her soulmate. That wasn’t how these things were supposed to work. The mark was only a symbol of one significant moment in string of hundreds. Soulmates lived their whole lives together, enjoying decades of mutual love and support. Emma had only gotten a few hours, and she hadn’t even been able to enjoy any of it. There was supposed to be more. After what she had lived through, she deserved more. If she could survive the fucking helicopter crash, she deserved to have Paul back.

So, she kept asking. And PEIP kept giving her the same answer. Paul Matthews was dead like the rest of Hatchetfield.

“Save for one pocket-sized squirrel we found burrowed in the chest of a local woodworker,” Schaffer continued.

“Oh, Peanuts!” Emma said. Everyone in Hatchetfield had followed the story of Papa Ed and his little refugee. It was the one thing the whole town could get behind. “I’m glad he got out of there.”

“Now, that is a story we can disclose to the public. In the wake of a tragedy like this, a little good news can go a long way.”

Emma nodded. If her life before the Catastrophe was anything to go by, that sentiment was very true.

She was still looking for her little bit of good news.

“Yeah,” she said glumly. “It’s just… Paul.” She gestured with her left hand.

“He was a good man, Kelly. If not for his sacrifice, the outbreak would have spread to the mainland. It was contained in Hatchetfield, but if it had gotten loose here in Clivesdale, there’d be no stopping it.”

She’d heard all of this from Schaffer before. She never liked how impersonally she talked about Paul. Sure, he had done a good thing. Heroic, even. But he was more than his sacrifice. He’d had a life, a personality, dreams, wants. That was all gone.

Schaffer turned on a heel to face Emma. “Goodbye, Kelly. Good luck with the pot farm.”

They exchanged salutes. Schaffer began to leave, but just before she reached the door, she turned back.

“One more thing. You’ll be escorted to Colorado by a Mr. Ben Bridges. He’s waiting outside.”

Emma furrowed her brow. “I don’t know any Ben Bridges.”

“Well, according to our records, you two are very good friends. PEIP would like to see it become something more.”

Schaffer winked at Emma and left without an explanation. She was left wondering what the hell that was about. Was PEIP trying to set her up with somebody as an apology for Paul? She didn’t like the idea, but she wasn’t sure what else it could be.

She heard footsteps, lighter than Schaffer’s heavy boots, coming from the direction Schaffer had just left in. When Emma turned to look, she smiled her first real smile since the meteorite.

Paul.

Paul, in his plain, black suit, jacket restored. Paul, unharmed, unscratched. Paul, with his big, blue eyes meeting Emma’s, uncertain how she would react. Paul, smiling back at her with that unreal smile of his.

Suddenly, the pieces fell into place. Paul Matthews hadn’t survived the apocalypse, but neither had Emma Perkins.

“Oh, my god. Paul!” Her voice was shaky with pure joy. She felt like her face might split open from how widely she was smiling.

In an instant, they were clutching each other’s arms. “You made it?” she asked, almost not believing what she saw in front of her two weeks of constant denials.

He nodded vigorously in response. His face echoed her disbelief, but he was similarly far too happy to care.

They launched into a tight embrace. God, just to have someone to survive the apocalypse with felt like a miracle. To have that person be Paul felt like a dream. She hugged him like she never wanted to let him go.

“We made it!” She exclaimed into his chest. Paul laughed gently. His chin rested on her head, and he nuzzled his cheek into her hair.

“ _Emma, I’m sorry, you lost…”_

Emma’s blood went cold. She felt the vibrations come from Paul’s chest. There was no denying that he had been the one singing to her. She pulled herself back to look at Paul. He was still smiling at her, and he still held her arms in his hands.

“Paul?” she asked, hoping beyond hope that this was some sort of joke she didn’t get. He was still smiling.

“ _Emma, I’m sorry,”_ he repeated, bending down to look her in the eye and clasping both her hands between his. “ _You lost your way.”_

Emma removed her hands from Paul’s. “Paul, you’re scaring me, can you –”

Paul took her up in a partner dancing hold and began to waltz her around the hallway, eyes flashing a different blue from his normal color.

“ _What if I told you I made it, and this is the life that I chose?”_

Emma heart sank as fear bubbled up in her stomach. She couldn’t pretend this thing was Paul anymore. Paul would never choose to relinquish his free will to become a singing, dancing puppet.

_“Would you even believe it, Emma? Do you believe in ghosts?”_

She tried to wriggle out of his hold, but Paul treated it like he was spinning her out. The hand that held her right hand clamped viciously down on her fingers. As hard as she tugged, he kept his hold on her without even diverting his focus from the song. She even tried peeling his fingers off, but they didn’t even twitch.

“ _What if I told you a story that settled all the dust?”_

Paul wrapped an arm around her shoulders and swayed her from side to side. Then, he grabbed her other hand and spun her out again. The choreography was simple, but it was coming too fast for Emma to react to. She was also starting to get dizzy from the spins.

_“I’m still the man you trust.”_

Paul walked her forward with the hand he still held and beckoned her with the other. He was bent down to eye level again, looking her directly in the eye. He was smiling a reassuring smile, but the blue light emanating from his eyes made it hard for Emma to be anything other than unsettled.

_“It’s inevitable for us.”_

And that lyric hit her hard. All the emotion she had tried and failed to access over the past two weeks came flooding out. She felt her face contort with grief. Not only had Paul sacrificed himself in vain, but now the meteorite was using him to get to her. If Paul could see what it was making his body do, he would be horrified.

“Get away from me! You’re not Paul,” she wailed. “You’re one of them!”

Emma slipped out of his grasp and ran down the hallway away from Paul. She was just about to turn a corner when he appeared and blocked her escape.

_“Before, I had no ambition, but now my life is a song.”_

Paul lifted his elbow, and Hidgens spun in from around the corner and landed so Paul’s elbow fell onto his shoulder as if they were buddies. Paul smiled and pointed to Hidgens, as if to indicate that Hidgens was just as happy as Paul was. Hidgens smiled, as well, but his looked emptier. She staggered backward.

_“Don’t you want to see me happy? Is that so tragically wrong?”_

Apparently, yes, given what the hive had done to him.

Paul and Hidgens danced and spun toward her, forcing Emma to back away into the waiting arms of the nurse from earlier. She screamed in shock.

_”What if the only choice is, we have to sing to survive?”_

Paul took her shoulders in his hands and swayed her again before releasing her to clasp his hands together in the style of the church. Hidgens and the nurse copied his movements. Emma was left in a state of shock. There were more of them in the hospital. The nurse had let them in.

_“We must go on with the show.”_

Paul took her wrist again and walked her around as the nurse sang along with him. As she turned, her face twisted in horror as she saw three more aliens filter in: Bill, Ted, and a man she didn’t recognize dressed in office garb. Paul was still looking at her with that overly-trusting stare.

_“It’s inevitable…”_

All of the aliens joined Paul to sing that line. He punctuated the phrase with a sweet kiss to her knuckles. Then, suddenly, he flung her across the room.

_“…to know what I want now!”_

The song had changed there. She could only hear the vocals, but it was obvious they had transitioned into a different melody. Paul was barely paying her any attention as he bobbed his head to the beat that wasn’t there. The other aliens sang back up and hopped up and down. They were all facing a blank wall, so Emma decided now was her chance to run and began to limp down the hallway as quickly as she could.

_“Emma, I want you to join the party!”_

At the sound of her name, Emma yelped and spun around to face the aliens. Paul was pointing at her, still smiling as he sang and danced. None of them had made a move to grab her yet. Paul dove onto one knee, extending his hand.

_“Are you going to tip me?”_

The other aliens circled Paul as he continued to bob his head. As they sang a backup line about coffee, even more aliens joined the fray. One of them was Nora, and one of them was the annoying teenager from yesterday with the blood sugar problem. Emma didn’t know who the third lady was, but she was wearing an apron that said “Greenpeace”.

_“Look at the fun we’re having already!”_

The arrival of the three new aliens spurred Emma into running as she fled down the hall from the musical number, abandoning her backpack in the process. As she ran, she could still hear Paul sing.

_“I found my calling, you can do the same, now.”_

Emma passed a lot of doorways, but they all led to individual rooms. Hiding in one of those would be backing herself into a corner. She needed to find a stairwell, or an elevator, though she dreaded being prone while waiting for one to arrive. Paul’s voice had grown fainter.

_“Put your words to lyrics and you’re playing the game, now.”_

She hadn’t been paying attention to how many turns she’d made and in what direction. If she had, Emma would have noticed herself taking her third left turn. She was instead paying attention to how her leg was starting to throb. Paul’s singing had gotten louder again.

_“It’s all there is, and all there ever was.”_

Emma turned left again, and she was face to face with Paul and the Pips doing a couple two-step turns. She was on the opposite side of him this time.

“It’s just a fucking loop?!” she cried to no one in the room. Briefly, she damned the architect that designed the hospital straight to hell. Paul and company didn’t pay attention to her as she passed in front of them, but she wasn’t letting her guard down yet. Her limp was getting worse with every step, and the pain was starting to shoot up her body. She needed to find the stairs fast or she might not make it down them.

_“Emma!”_

They all practically shouted her name, scaring the shit out of her. The aliens had pivoted to face her, each face lying on the spectrum between a saccharin smile and feral bared teeth. Paul had stopped smiling for the first time to grimace evilly at her, chin bowed, and eyebrows and mouth twisted into unnatural shapes. He stood tall in the center of the crowd, wreathed by the others in various states of hunching and crouching. Paul had one had painfully extended to her.

_“Let me puke in your mouth, Em!”_

The song had changed again. The other aliens oohed and ahhed as Paul sang that sick lyric. Their swirling and flailing arms looked like living vines around him, and weirdly, he looked like he was in control.

_“Just open your food bin, girl.”_

Emma could do nothing but sob in that moment. She hadn’t seen any other people in the hospital since Schaffer left. She was alone and the aliens kept coming. They weren’t even bothering to do anything to her yet because they knew they had her.

_“And you can join The Hive.”_

Was that what they called themselves, she wondered distantly. As she turned away from Paul, unable to look at him anymore, she spotted a sign on the wall for a stairwell. It was right in front of Paul and the Hive. They were performing to it as if it were an audience.

_“By showing those…”_

The Hive rose and took a step toward Emma threateningly. Emma swallowed another sob and tried to focus on how to get to the stairs without the Hive following her.

_“Hands! Show me those jazz hands!”_

The song changed again, and this one Emma recognized. While in recovery, Emma hadn’t had much to do, so one day she had decided to nickname all of the songs the Hive had sung to her. She’d called the one at Beanies “The Coffee Song”. The one Paul’s coworker and her cop husband – Emma was really bad with names – was “Time to Die”. Hidgens song probably had a name like “Showstopper” or something equally stupid, but Emma chose to call it “The Bad Song”, perhaps out of spite. The song the PEIP agents sang was called “Patriotic Bullshit”.

The song Paul was now singing Emma had called “The Cop Song”, because it had been the one the cops sang.

_“Get ‘em up, or you’re shit outta luck!”_

That was the second time the Hive had threatened her, and her terror was mounting, but they hadn’t done anything yet.

_“Show me those hands, show me those jazz hands!”_

The Hive began to dance away from her. Paul’s eyes were screwed shut in what Emma thought must be enjoyment. She scurried toward the door to the stairs.

_“Or I might be inclined…”_

They trailed off like they were going to move into another song. She turned her back to the Hive to open the door, getting the distinct, jittery feeling that this might be her only shot.

_“…to plant my seed!”_

Two sets of hands clamped down on her upper arms and pulled her away from the stairs. Pain shot through her body from her arms from the tight, stony grip Ted and Bill had on her. Even more pain pulsed from her bad leg as they dragged her heels across the floor. Emma screamed and struggled, but they didn’t budge.

_“The Hive needs to feed!”_

They set her down in the center of the hall where all the alien eyes were watching her. A few more had joined the ensemble: General McNamara, the local homeless man, and three teenage girls. As he sang, Paul walked over to where Emma had been standing earlier, facing away from them.

_“Happiness is guaranteed!”_

The ensemble lined up single file and linked arms. The pain in her arms and legs was still searing her. It took all of Emma’s willpower to keep herself from curling up into a ball on the ground.

_“If you just give us one last…”_

The Hive was gearing up for something. She could feel it in her bones.

_“…Show Stoppin’ Number!”_

Emma screamed and ear-piercing, throat-thrashing scream, but she still didn’t drown out Hidgens’ shitty song. The Hive were in a kickline, and Emma completely lost it. She screamed and cried and backed away as the gleefully advanced on her.

_“With Emma front and center!”_

A streak of hot tears fell down her face as she screwed her eyes shut and wailed. All of the fear and worry from that day in Hidgens’ basement was reprised in Emma’s mind, then amplified and expelled.

_“A kickline is inevitable!”_

Paul, from her right side, came over to her in a one man kickline. His kicks were much higher than the others’, and the flick of his toes seemed poised to bruise. By the look on his face as he got closer, he was relishing in it.

_“What if I told you a story: how the world became peaceful and just?”_

The Hive was singing Paul’s original song as they circled her in two rings. Hidgens grabbed her by the shoulders to keep her in place before rejoining his place in the circle. In the sea of swirling, singing faces, Paul’s face and voice were lost.

_“It was inevitable…”_

They came to a stop to line themselves up in front of her. Paul wasn’t in the line.

_“…inevitable…”_

They took large, stilted steps toward her. She backed into the door and fell to her knees, more pain rocketing up her left leg.

_“…inevitable!”_

The line of aliens leaned menacingly over her, arms outstretched. Emma was cornered, outnumbered, incapacitated, crying, and hopeless. After endless running, she had finally been caught. The Hive parted in the middle, and Paul stood in front of her, His eyes were so wide and bright they eclipsed his pupils and lit up his whole face. Emma couldn’t bear to watch Paul – Paul’s body – be the one to take her down. She shielded her face with her arms.

“The Apotheosis is…upon…”

What began as a tuneless shout trailed off into a bemused murmur. The hallway was quiet.

Emma dared to look up around her arms. Paul’s eyes were still alight, but they had dimmed. He was staring pensively at her. But there was something else there. It looked like surprise. His body was unmoving. The rest of the hive stared blankly ahead.

She put her arms down slowly. His head followed the movement of her hands. The Hive’s heads nodded in an identical motion, though none of them seemed to be looking at anything.

Paul and the rest of the Hive knelt down in front of her. All of them pointed their fingers outward in the same motion, but Paul’s landed on Emma’s hand.

“What is that?” they all chorused. The Hive’s many voices sounded dead when they weren’t singing.

Emma, trying and failing to stop herself from ugly crying, followed Paul’s point. A jagged little musical note greeted her. She had forgotten she wasn’t wearing a patch anymore.

“Oh, this is, uh,” Emma sobbed again and took a big sniff. “This is my soul mark. I was born with it, kinda.”

The Hive cocked their heads gently to the side. Emma was still crying, but the adrenaline was wearing off. Energy was leaking from her and intense pain was filling in the space. All she wanted in that moment was to be enveloped by darkness and quiet. She leaned further down the door and closed her eyes, hoping Paul could make puking in her mouth as quick and painless as possible.

Then, Emma heard a rustle of fabric. Opening her eyes, she saw Paul shedding his jacket and unbuttoning his left cuff. The Hive were all going through the same motions, even though most of them didn’t have jackets or cuffs.

Paul held out his exposed left wrist. An identical musical note to the one Emma had grown up with adorned his wrist.

Welp. That confirmed what Emma already knew. The Hive had gotten her soulmate, and they were about to get her, too.

Emma was too spent to sob anymore, but wide rivers of tears trailed down her cheeks at the revelation. It felt like the last nail in her coffin. Her life literally couldn’t get any sadder. She’d lived her entire life thinking she was promised a happy ending, but the universe, or God, or whoever had planned a tragedy.

“Why does his match?” the Hive asked, shaking all of their left wrists in the same direction as Paul shook his at Emma.

She sniffed and passed her unmarked wrist across her cheeks to wipe away the tears, but they were replaced as quickly as they had been removed. “Because he was my soulmate. You know, the perfect person who would love me in exactly the right way for the rest of my life or some shit.”

“What does that mean?” they asked, their tone growing more urgent.

“I don’t know,” she started. “It means…the universe knew what kind of people we were and what kind of people we’d need, and it found the right one? I don’t know! Nobody knows how they work or how they show up! They just do! Once you find the person with the matching mark, you’ve found the best person you will ever have in your life, and you will spend the rest of your lives together. True love, happily ever after, all that bullshit. The mark is supposed to be a guaranteed happy life. But not since you showed up.”

The Hive ignored her dig at them. Paul’s eyebrows furrowed and his eyes went blank. For a minute, they all just sat like that.

Then, they all turned their wrists, all bear save for Paul’s, to Emma, pointing at them. “How come I don’t have one?” they all asked, but Ted’s voice was the loudest among them.

Emma shook her head, unsure why she was answering their questions. “They’re, like, super rare. Apparently only, like, 0.005% of the population is marked, or something.”

They all looked down reverently at their wrists. They simultaneously stroked their wrists, but Emma could swear Paul was leading the action.

They looked up. Paul’s eyes met hers, wide-eyed. They all slowly lowered into sitting positions on the floor of the hospital. 

She held Paul’s gaze for a long time. Then, his eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly.

“So you’re the reason he did it,” they mumbled.

Emma scoffed. “What, Paul going to the meteorite? Yeah, maybe. It’s more likely he went just to end your asses. He really didn’t like musicals. Paul is stupidly brave, though, so maybe that’s why he did it.”

In her rambling, Emma wasn’t watching Paul or the other members of the Hive. While the Hive went statue still, their faces blank as mannequins, Paul’s eyes were squeezed shut while his eyebrows twitched.

“I don’t know how you did it, but you finally got him. You were really fucking gunning for him at the end.” Emma huffed humorlessly. “I bet you’re real fucking excited you got him now that you know he’s so special. I bet you’re real happy you got to ruin his life so badly that you can use him to kill the one person who he would love more than anybody. I bet you sick fucks get a real fucking kick out of that, huh?”

She shot a sharp glare at the alien pretending to be Paul. His face was screwed up in a tight knot. The veins in his neck bulged. Emma forgot everything around her but herself and Paul.

“Paul?” She tried to crawl toward him, but her leg loudly protested. She grunted in pain.

At the sound, Paul’s blue eyes shot open. But now, they were _Paul’s_ eyes, no trace of alien light within them. A familiar worried expression colored his face.

“Emma?” he asked, confused, and it was only Paul’s voice that spoke. His eyes darted around the room, flicking back to her on frequent intervals.

“Paul? Is that you? Like, really you?” she asked cautiously.

He gave her a small nod. He turned his head and looked at the motionless Hive surrounding them.

“What just happened?” she whispered.

He looked back at her. “I don’t know, but we should get out of here.” He scrambled to his feet and slung his jacket on haphazardly. Emma was still struggling to stand.

His brow lowered. “Do you need me to carry you?”

She nodded. Her hubris had left her a long time ago.

He gently snaked his arms under her knees and behind her back and lifted her as slowly as he dared. She suppressed several cries of pain.

Once he was upright, he jimmied the door to the stairwell open and slipped them both through, careful not to knock her against the wall. The hive remained perfectly still as Paul and Emma hurried down the hospital stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now we go off the beaten path!


	8. Last Resort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma and Paul don't have a lot of options

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon has officially diverged! I can't wait to show you where it's going to go!
> 
> tw for vomiting

Paul had carried Emma down three flights of stairs before ducking out of the stairwell. They both scanned the hallway looking for an empty room as Paul tried to walk without jostling Emma too much. It was only a few seconds before she found one and pointed it out to him. He hurried inside and laid her down on the bed. Emma exhaled sharply at the adjustment. Through a wince, she saw Paul close the door to their room.

He walked back over to Emma and sat in the visitor’s chair next to her. He was tapping his fists together while he surveyed the room.

“Paul,” she said, careful to keep her voice down.

His head shot back to her. “Huh?”

“You want to tell me what the hell just happened up there?”

Paul blinked. “I wish I could. I’m not really sure what happened. It was like… like I woke up? I don’t know.”

Okay, that wasn’t super helpful. Emma pivoted. “Okay…What’s the last thing you remember?”

He closed his eyes, thinking hard. “I remember walking to the Starlight,” he started slowly. “I didn’t run into any of those alien people until I actually got to the theater. Then they were everywhere. Bill, Ted, Mr. Davidson, Hidgens. They were all there. They didn’t attack right away. They just kept taunting me, asking me _‘What do you want, Paul?’_ ”

That last part had come out sung, and Paul’s entire body shook while it happened, like it was rejecting the song. He gritted his teeth and swallowed. When he opened his mouth again, he began to cough violently. Paul bolted out of the chair and rushed to the bucket sitting on the floor by the other bed. He hunched over and hacked into it for a minute or so. His back was to her, so she couldn’t see what was going on with him. Eventually, his breathing evened out, and he stood back up. He wiped his face with the side of his hand unconsciously. As he walked over to the sink to wash his hands and face, she saw a splash of electric blue on his hand.

Paul took another deep breath and sat back down next to Emma. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what that was.”

Emma had a couple theories, but she wasn’t sure what to do with them yet. “Do you remember anything else about going to destroy the meteorite?”

“Um…” He paused to think again. “Eventually they started to sing to me, and…” The color drained from Paul’s face.

“They got me,” he whispered. “Just by walking into the Starlight, they had me.”

“What?”

“The meteor,” Paul gesticulated. “It-it emits these spores that can infect people just by breathing them in. They were everywhere in the theater. The whole place was practically glowing blue! I was breathing them in as soon as I walked in! That’s how they got me! About halfway through the song, I started hearing the music. And then, I couldn’t help it, I was singing and dancing. But I was still…me, sometimes. Like, I could still move on my own, but I had to do it between dance moves.” He spoke like he was trying to figure out what he was talking about as much as Emma was.

“Paul,” she said, getting his attention back. “Did you blow up the meteorite?” Emma knew the meteorite ended up a pile of space dust, but had Paul done that, or had something else happened? It seemed increasingly likely that maybe something else had gone down that they didn’t know about.

He thought about it, and began to nod, seemingly before he knew the answer.

“Yeah,” he said, gazing back at two weeks ago and absently toying with his unbuttoned cuffs. “I pulled the pin on a grenade and shoved it right in that bastard. Then, I blacked out.”

“From the explosion,” she supplied.

He nodded. “The rest is…” he grimaced. “…it’s just snippets.”

“Okay,” she prompted.

He tapped at his wrist. “The first thing I remember after the explosion is removing my patch. It was weird and frayed after the blast.”

Emma scoffed. “You’re telling me the patch doesn’t withstand a measly grenade blast? Fucking waste of money.”

Paul laughed. “Yeah, I mean, come on. I paid forty bucks for a box of those things, and they can’t last _one_ day of an alien apocalypse? What’s the point?”

They both laughed for a little bit, but silently agreed that that was enough joking about the Catastrophe for the time being.

He continued. “The next thing must have happened a bit later. I was already here in Clivesdale. I’m walking toward the hospital with Bill, Ted, and Hidgens behind me. Then, I’m in a hospital bed and a nurse is taking care of me. Then, Ted is puking goo into her mouth. The last thing I remember is sitting in a hospital bed and a woman in a PEIP uniform handing me a manilla envelope.”

Paul was missing a few pieces, but Emma felt like she had the full picture. Paul, newly infected, walked all the way from Hatchetfield to Clivesdale to feign being a survivor of the explosion. He’d had Ted infect the nurse who was taking care of him – presumably, the quiet nurse from earlier – to give himself credibility and to help him sneak more infected people into the hospital. He’d kept his cover up around Colonel Schaffer until she had given him a dossier of his own and they had let him see Emma.

Because once the Hive had Paul, Emma was their next most wanted.

There were still a few things that confused her, though. “How did you snap out of it?”

“I’m not sure.” He looked down at his lap, then back up, holding up his mark. “Probably has something to do with this, I guess.”

Emma nodded. That much was obvious.

Paul turned to look at the door. “What do you think we should do? We can’t hide here forever.”

As much as Emma’s screaming leg wanted to stay here forever, she knew Paul was right. Who knew when the Hive would snap out of their weird trance and come after them again? Emma didn’t think her leg could handle any more running for her life, even though that seemed to be the flavor of the month of Emma’s life.

She could think of one option, but she was hesitant to bring it up. It would put Paul in danger, and she had just gotten him back, dammit! Having Paul back felt like the first gulp of fresh air after weeks underwater.

But Emma’s luck was notoriously shitty, so of course her new PEIP-issued cell phone vibrated in her back pocket, and of course it was Schaffer calling. She scowled as she answered it.

“Yo, Schaff, what do you want?” she monotoned.

“Kelly, I need your exact location right now,” came Schaffer’s voice, more stern than Emma had ever heard it.

“I’m safe, I’m on the third floor of the hospital. What’s going on?”

“Your room number, now.”

“I don’t know, just a few rooms down the hall from the stairs?”

“Room 312,” Paul supplied quietly.

“312,” she parroted to Schaffer.

“I’ll be there in one minute.” The line went dead.

Emma rolled her eyes. Why couldn’t anyone at PEIP just answer a fucking question like a normal fucking person?

“Who was that?” Paul asked politely.

“Colonel Schaffer,” Emma groaned. “She’s McNamara’s number two, so she’s running the whole operation right now.” Then, Emma remember why she hadn’t wanted to call Schaffer in the first place. “Paul, maybe you should keep the whole ‘being a part of the Hive’ thing a secret from Schaffer.”

Paul did a double take. “Why?”

“The way PEIP has been talking about ‘eradicating the infection’ hasn’t sounded very merciful.”

He just looked searchingly at her for a minute. “Okay,” he said eventually.

The door opened and Schaffer stood imposingly in the doorway.

“Kelly. Ben,” she said curtly.

Paul and Emma nodded their greetings. Schaffer nodded back.

“There’s a saferoom up on the fourth floor waiting for you. Kelly, are you okay to walk?” she asked, sending a worried look to Emma’s bad leg.

“I can take her,” Paul said as he stood from his chair.

Schaffer’s face shifted to one of surprise. “Ben. You’re speaking. I thought you might still be selectively mute.

Emma looked over at Paul, hoping with every fiber of her being that the impending dread she felt heavy on her shoulders wasn’t showing on her face. Paul opened his mouth as if to answer Schaffer, but instead he just smiled weakly and shrugged one shoulder.

“Right,” said Schaffer. “Follow me, Ben. I’ve got a team outside to serve as protection in case any more infected come out of the woodworks.”

Paul gently wormed his arms underneath Emma’s back and knees. His eyes flicked over to hers, waiting for her go-ahead before he lifted her off the bed. She nodded encouragingly and only hissed in pain briefly as he took her up in his arms slowly and steadily.

When they reached where Schaffer was standing in the door, she sent another appraising look to Emma’s thigh. “Did you reinjure your leg while trying to evade the intruders?”

“Intruders” was a real fucking weird way to say “murderous alien shitheads”, but Emma’s emotions were too fried to pick that fight. Instead, she just scowled at her thigh. “Did a lot of running.”

“Understandable. We’ll have Dr. Porter look you over once the threat has died down.”

As they walked down the hall, Emma, Paul, and Schaffer were flanked by four PEIP agents in SWAT uniforms. And the guns they were packing were _holy shit_ big. Still, those huge guns didn’t make her feel safer than Paul’s sturdy arms around her. And, ugh, even thinking that made her feel gross and sappy, but it was true. And fuck, she deserved to want to be protected for a while after the shitshow she’d been living through. She deserved to be able to let somebody else take up the burden for her. 

She looked up at him. He registered the motion and looked back down at her. His eyes were still their natural blue. They hadn’t reverted to the glowing, electric color they had been less than ten minutes ago. One corner of his mouth quirked up in a reassuring smile, and it worked. In spite of all the shit she’d been through today – with all the people she knew trying to kill her while also maintaining a goddamn kickline – she felt reassured.

Which was totally backwards, wasn’t it? He was to one who went to the Starlight Theater and blew up the meteorite while struggling not to become one of the infected. He was the one who had only _just_ regained control over himself after two weeks of being alien slave. He was the one who couldn’t remember being an alien slave, giving him no fucking clue what kind of awful things the Hive made him do. Yet he was the one reassuring her.

How did he do that? How was he able to lift all of the stress, the nerves, and the fear off of her – like they were a bag of sand she had slung over her back – with just one look? Did he have fucking superpowers?

She smiled back, and his smile grew warmer as his entire face went beet red.

The saferoom was a repurposed broom closet, Emma guessed based off its placement in the hall. When Schaffer opened the door and held it for her and Paul, she could see it was cleared of all its previous contents, leaving it an empty cement box. As austere as it was, Emma couldn’t deny it was safe.

Schaffer spoke to them as Paul set her down carefully on the floor. “I’m going to check on the team tasked with taking in the infected intruders. I will come to update you on our progress as soon as I can.”

With that, she swiveled around on her heel, and marched out of the broom closet, shutting the door behind her.

Emma groaned and leaned her head against the wall. “How is this any better than the room we were just in? I didn’t have to sit on the fucking floor there!”

Paul chuckled and sat down next to her. “I have no idea.”

“See, this is why I never trust the government,” she said, pointing an accusing finger at him.

He was tapping his fists together. “Yeah, well, I think they’re all we’ve got. We just have to hope they don’t get infected, too.”

She turned serious. “What’s our plan if they do?”

He shrugged. “Run? What else can we do?”

The room went silent. Paul was right, they had pretty much put all of their eggs in the Schaffer basket. If the Hive got her, too, they were basically dead. The Hive would know exactly where to find them. Paul would be reinfected before she would even be able to stand up. After that, she was as good as infected, too. Even though she had survived this long, her situation hadn’t gotten any less hopeless.

But she had to survive. She hadn’t gotten this far just to give up. Emma Perkins was a lot of things – flakey, foul-mouthed, unfeeling, and a bit of a bitch – but she wasn’t a quitter. She was not going to take this alien invasion lying down, even if she was going to have a hard time getting out of a horizontal position.

And fuck it, Paul was coming with her. That awkward nerd had exploded a fucking meteorite for her all by himself, and she would be goddamned if he wasn’t getting out of this with her.

“Get out of here.”

He turned to look at her. “What?”

“Let’s sneak out of here,” she whispered. “Schaffer and PEIP are all focused on fighting the alien motherfuckers, no one’s paying attention to us! We can sneak out of this fucking hospital, hotwire a car, and get the fuck out of dodge! We have an opening! We can leave this fucking dumpster fire for good!”

Paul blinked rapidly, brow furrowed. “Emma, do you know how to hotwire a car?”

“You learn a lot in Sierra del Mico. Come on!” Emma began lifting herself off the wall and onto her feet.

Paul gently pushed her back down. “Emma, there are two guards posted at the door. They won’t let us out.”

Emma deflated. “Really?”

Paul nodded. “Yeah.” His eyes were wide with a brew of emotions Emma couldn’t quite figure out. There was worry – of course there was, this was Paul – and then some dread, even some affection dashed in. But behind all of that, there was something else Emma wasn’t sure she recognized. Maybe she did, but either way, she didn’t know what it was.

“Fuck,” she spat. She hadn’t noticed the guards. “We’re dead.”

He rubbed her upper arm comfortingly. “Maybe not. Colonel Schaffer could still take them all out in a blaze of glory.”

She snorted. “And then the aliens will start singing the Star-Spangled Banner as a sign of surrender?”

He smiled. “As a bald eagle waves a tiny American flag in its talons.”

They laughed. Once the closet got quiet again, Paul shifted their positions so she was sat in his lap, rambling a bit about how the hard floor can’t be good for her injured leg. Then he got scared and backpedaled, sputtering out the question if a change in positions was okay with her. When she told him it was fine, he rested her back against his chest and wrapped his right arm around her shoulders. His left hand hovered microns above her knee, as if awaiting permission. She leaned her head into the crook of his neck, and he finally laid his hand down.

She was familiar with the embrace of a man. Hell, she was familiar with the embrace of a woman, too. Her years in Guatemala were a lot of fun. Maybe the apocalypse was fucking with her head, but something about being enveloped in Paul on the floor of a broom closet with only a lightbulb on a string for lighting – it was right. In a way the others never were. She had known this day was coming, the day she would be with her soulmate for the first time. She knew it would be different. She knew it would be special.

But this was better than she had expected.

Emma didn’t know how long they just sat there, Paul occasionally tracing swirling lines onto her knee. It must have been a few minutes, but it felt like only fifteen seconds before the door busted open and Schaffer stood before them. She hadn’t heard the doorknob bash against the wall as much as she felt Paul jump at the surprise.

“Ben. Kelly. The infected have been successfully neutralized. Even so, to keep the two of you safe, PEIP would like to move you closer to our base of operations.”

Paul nodded. “Okay.”

Schaffer took a step back, out of the doorway. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll escort you to the ground floor.”

Paul maneuvered his arm underneath Emma’s legs and lifted her again. He followed Schaffer out of the closet.

She continued. “We’ve been utilizing the hospital’s research labs down there to examine some of the plasma the infected have been leaving everywhere in hopes of developing a cure. With several infected folks now in custody, we may actually be able to test some of the vaccines our scientists have been developing.”

In spite of the good news, Emma was starting to get a little pissed. She had been at this hospital for two whole weeks, and this was the first she was hearing of “vaccines”. Why had Schaffer chosen now to tell them, instead of the millions of other chances she’d had before now?

Thankfully, Paul spoke before Emma could. “How were you able to neutralize all of those…” He faltered for a word and quickly gave up. “There were close to a dozen of them, maybe more. How did you do it so fast?”

“You know,” Schaffer said thoughtfully. “it was the damnedest thing. They were neutralized when we got there.”

“What?” Emma asked.

“We showed up, guns at the ready, and they were all just stood there, motionless. None of them moved to even look at us when we got there. They didn’t even give any resistance to being handcuffed. We simply led them into captivity.”

“Huh,” Emma huffed. Credit where credit was due, the Hive could always be counted on to be unexpected. She looked up at Paul to gauge his reaction. He was lost in thought.

“Now, Ben,” Schaffer barked as she held the door to the stairwell open, jostling Paul out of whatever train of thought he’d been on. “Our doctors would like for you to undergo an MRI scan. Your nurse was among the infected, so we can’t be sure she hasn’t done anything to you without your knowledge and fabricated the records.”

“Okay,” Paul responded. His eyes were focused on the stairs, trying not to lose his footing as he carried her down, so he didn’t see the warning glare Emma was burning into his jaw. To Emma, this felt like a trap. They only wanted a brain scan? No other physical examinations? They already knew about his lapse with the infected and were just looking for an excuse to imprison him, too.

But he wasn’t infected anymore! His eyes didn’t glow, he was speaking like a normal person. He’d had numerous chances to infect her and he hadn’t. Taking him into custody would be wrongful imprisonment.

“Great!” said Schaffer. “Also, if you’re up for it, we’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the Catastrophe, seeing as you’re speaking again.”

“Okay,” he repeated, his voice heavy with an emotion Emma couldn’t name. Once they were on a landing, Emma pinched his neck hard. Paul looked at her, and his face was…melancholic? She intensified her glare, hoping he got the message “What the fuck are you doing?” loud and clear. His face remained still, but Emma got the feeling he got her message. She also got the feeling he was sending one back, but she didn’t know what it said.

“Excellent, Ben. PEIP appreciates your cooperation.” Even if Emma didn’t. “Kelly, while he’s doing that, we’ll have that leg looked at. How’s it holding up?”

Emma swallowed her anger. “Hell of a lot worse, after running for my life and sitting on a stone floor, but it shouldn’t need to be chopped off.” She couldn’t help some of her bitterness slipping through.

Once they got to the ground floor, Schaffer stopped them. A broad-shouldered man in a lab coat stood at attention at a fork in the hallway.

“Ben, if you’ll follow Doctor Hughes, he’ll take you to get that MRI. Kelly, I’ll lead you to Doctor Porter to get your leg fixed up.”

Schaffer stood next to Paul, one arm out, ready to take Emma’s shoulders and walk her to fucking wherever.

Emma tightened her grip on Paul’s jacket. “I’m not leaving Paul,” she said, a warning in her tone.

“Emma.”

The sound of her real name snapped her attention to Paul. “Go with Colonel Schaffer. I’ll be fine,” he said softly.

“Like hell you will. I’m not going to be separated from you. Not again.”

“Emma, you need to get your leg looked at. And it’s not like you can come into the MRI with me.”

“I don’t care, Paul. I’m not going to be separated from you again. I just got you back.” Her arms tightened around his neck.

“It’ll only be for a little while, Emma.”

She hated the way he kept saying her name. It was relaxing her without her consent. She wanted to be angry with him, dammit, but he wasn’t letting her.

He slowly put her down on the ground, never breaking eye contact. Her bad leg only gave a slight twinge upon her feet touching the floor.

“It’s going to be okay. Okay?”

Why did she get the feeling that even he wasn’t sure he could keep that promise?

“Okay.”

He transferred her to Schaffer with a sad smile. They shared a lingering look before Schaffer turned her around to walk down the hall.

⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫⩫

Doctor Porter told her that her leg hadn’t sustained any permanent or even long-term damage. She had just worked it a little too much. He explained that she would need a bit more physical therapy and that she would be getting around in the wheelchair again for another couple of days, but on the whole she was fine. Schaffer, who had left as soon as she had dropped Emma off with Doctor Porter, returned and asked Emma if she would like to be present for Paul’s “interview”. Emma still didn’t trust it, but of course she was going. She had no plans of leaving Paul out to dry.

As she was pushed through the hallways of the ground floor of Clivesdale Hospital, Emma noticed that PEIP had claimed this part of the building for themselves. What should have looked just like the rest of the hospital instead resembled what Emma would have thought the Pentagon would have looked like when it was first being built. A lot of new or makeshift walls. Hospital rooms converted into research laboratories or bunkers for lower ranking PEIP agents.

Emma was led into a room with only three things in it: a window on the far wall looking into another room, a table pushed up against the wall with the window, and a man sitting at the table. She had seen enough crime dramas in her youth to know that she was looking at a standard set of interrogation rooms, complete with a one-way mirror. Schaffer sat her at the table next to the man.

“Agent Lee,” Schaffer greeted the man.

“Colonel,” the man returned, not looking up from his note-taking.

Emma heard the door behind her shut as Schaffer left. She paid no attention to that because looking through the one-way mirror into the interrogation room she could see Paul sitting in profile alone at a table in the center of the room. He was looking aimlessly at different blank spaces within the empty room. His jack was shed, and his sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. His wrists unconsciously strained against the cuffs secured to the table as he bumped his fists together.

As she noticed that detail, Emma turned to look at the man next to her. “Why the fuck is he cuffed?”

Agent Lee still didn’t look up from his paper. Emma could now see that along with his leather jacket, he was wearing sunglasses. Indoors.

“Standard protocol,” he said flatly.

“It’s standard protocol to restrain innocent people?!”

Agent Lee didn’t answer her question.

At that moment, Schaffer walked into Paul’s half of the interrogation room and sat down opposite him. She set a manilla folder in front of her and what Emma guessed was an audio recorder on the table between them and pressed a button. Her voice came to Emma’s half of the room through a tinny sound system.

“Case Number 0529, Audio Recording Number 044, Interview Number 001.” Emma scoffed at the word “interview”. “The date is the 8th of October 2018. Colonel Amanda Schaffer questions Ben Bridges, formerly Paul Matthews, survivor of the Hatchetfield Catastrophe.”

She looked up from the file. “Now, I’m going to have everyone in the room speak their full names so the recorder can hear them. This is so we can make an accurate transcript of the recording for later.”

Schaffer turned her head to the recorder. “I am Colonel Amanda Schaffer.” She paused and sent Paul a prompting look.

Paul leaned in toward the recorder. “My name is Ben Bridges, formerly Paul Matthews,” he said, with the tension of a man not sure how to give his own name.

An armed guard that Emma hadn’t noticed lurking in the corner stepped forward. “My name is Agent Justin Lerman. Security personnel.”

Schaffer nodded with satisfaction. Lerman slunk back into his corner. “The interview began at…” She looked at her watch. “1:07 pm.”

She sighed and sent a smile to Paul. “Sorry, Ben. I know the front matter can be tedious, but we at PEIP take our record-keeping very seriously.”

“I understand.”

“We also appreciate you giving both names during the introduction. Not all of our records may list both names, so it’s good have clarity here.”

Paul looked unsure how to respond. “No problem.”

“Now, Ben, let’s cut to the heart of the matter. When we did our initial sweep of the city of Hatchetfield on September 24th, we found a body in the Starlight Theater that was identified to belong to one Paul Matthews that we proclaimed dead upon arrival. One of our agents checked for breath and found none. When our doctors spoke to Kelly Kline, formerly Emma Perkins, another survivor of the Hatchetfield Catastrophe, she confirmed that Paul Matthews would have been last seen at the blast site in the theater. Then, on September 27th, a man appears, for lack of a better word, at the Clivesdale hospital showing weak but present vital signs who is also identified as Paul Matthews.

“So, with all of that, Ben, it seems like there are two of you: one alive, one dead. Do you have an explanation for that?”

Paul looked troubled. “Uh, no. I didn’t know about any of that.”

Schaffer’s brow furrowed. Lee leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

“I was unaware of all of the events you just described.”

Paul’s words were calm – hell of a lot calmer than Emma would be in his shoes – but he was clearly nervous already. His eyes were wide. He had abandoned trying to bump his fists and was instead drumming arrhythmically at the table with his fingers. If Schaffer continued like this, he would probably start sweating.

Emma was getting nervous, too. She didn’t know how they were going to lie their way out of this situation if Schaffer kept asking the tough questions right out the gate.

“Do you know why you are unaware of how you ended up in the Clivesdale hospital?”

“I don’t remember.”

Lee began writing vigorously.

“Have you been dealing with memory problems, Ben?” Schaffer asked.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Since the explosion.”

Schaffer nodded sagely. “How much do you remember about the time between September 23rd, the day of the Catastrophe, and now?”

“I remember everything about the 23rd up until the blast. I remember most of today. Everything in between is very spotty. Maybe a cumulative two minutes”

“So, Ben, would you say your memory is better now than it has been since the Catastrophe?”

“Yes.”

“What about your selective mutism?” She leaned into the recorder. “Let the record state that Ben had been mostly mute for his stay at the Clivesdale hospital up until before the attack that occurred at roughly 12:34 pm today. For more on Ben’s condition while in recovery, refer to File 088. For more on the attack on the Clivesdale Hospital, refer to File 102.”

She turned back to Paul. “Ben, you’ve spoken more during this interview than you have in the past two weeks. Did something happen today that helped heal both your memory and your mutism?”

Emma snarled. “This isn’t an interview, it’s a fucking interrogation,” she murmured under her breath.

Paul was more polite. “Yes.”

“Do you know what happened that caused these things?”

“Yes.” Before Schaffer could open her mouth again, Paul spoke again.

“May I ask you a few questions? There were a few things I was hoping you could clear up for me since my memory has been unreliable.” He gestured with his hands from where they were attached to the table.

Schaffer’s eyes flicked to the corner where Lerman was.

“Sure, Ben. We can answer a couple of questions for you.”

“You told me and Emma earlier that PEIP was developing a vaccine for the infection. Is that true?”

Schaffer nodded. “Yes, that is true. For the past two weeks, some of our scientists, led Special Agent Lee, have been examining some of the blue plasma that the infected people secrete, running tests on it to see if its vitality can be nullified.”

“Have they made good progress?”

To Emma’s confusion, Lee began furiously writing in his notes. They were talking about his research, weren’t they? What was he going to find out from Schaffer or Paul about his own work?

“According to Special Agent Lee, they are still studying the plasma. As of today, they still haven’t figured out its chemical makeup.”

“What are you going to do with the infected people you guys captured today? Do you plan to vaccinate them?”

“Yes, that is the current plan. Since the meteorite is destroyed, that means once every infected person in vaccinated, there will be no way to transmit the infection, so the vaccine will effectively be a cure. Hopefully that group of infected people can help us develop that cure.”

Paul was mulling something over. For the first time since Emma had gotten there, he glanced over at the one-way mirror. His eyes landed briefly on Emma’s nose. He had that look on his face again, the one she couldn’t figure out. He looked down at his wrists, turning them over. A lump of dread formed in her throat.

“Are those all of the questions you have for me?” Schaffer asked.

“Yes,” he said, not looking up from his wrists.

“Back to the previously posed question: Ben, what cured your memory and your mutism?”

Lee leaned in further.

Paul looked up. “Emma did.”

That shocked Schaffer into silence for a few seconds. Emma, for her part, was panicking. That big idiot! What was he trying to pull with that answer? Emma didn’t know what Paul’s plan was, but whatever lie he had in mind was not going to fool Schaffer with a shit start like that. Emma wanted to bust through the one-way mirror, grab Paul, and get the fuck out.

“Uh,” said Schaffer. “Can you elaborate?”

He lifted his left wrist as high as it would go. “Seeing Emma’s soul mark cured me of the infection. Sorry, I know that’s not helpful to your research.”

Emma knew Paul couldn’t see Lee, but he apologized like he had seen the way Lee’s shoulders slumped at his explanation.

She wasn’t thinking about that, though. She was, instead, screaming.

“No! Paul, you dumb piece of shit! Don’t fucking tell them that!”

Schaffer just nodded.

“I’m guessing you knew?” he asked.

“Your MRI showed trace amounts of extraterrestrial material in key parts of your brain. After finding Nurse Heather infected, we assumed either she infected you or you infected her. You infecting her seemed more likely.”

“See? I _told_ you that agreeing to that stupid fucking scan was a stupid fucking idea!” Emma screamed.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“Well,” Schaffer started. “since we found the infection in your brain, we are going to have to put you in isolation. We’re going to run some tests on you to see exactly what state you’re in, and we’ll go from there.”

“Okay, I can do that. Is there any way I can help with the vaccine?”

“We’ll just have to see how those tests go first, Ben. I think we’re done for now.”

Emma’s heartbeat rocketed up. No. No, no, no, no! Isolation? No! She had _just_ got him back! He was not going into isolation!

Schaffer looked at her watch. “The interview ended at 1:12 pm.”

Emma screamed and wailed an incoherent string of “Paul”s and “No”s. Tears appeared from nowhere and flooded down her cheeks in anger. She flew up from her wheelchair, sending it rolling back to the door. Pain seared her leg, but she didn’t care.

“Whoa, Emma!” said Lee in shock.

Lerman walked over to Paul, releasing him from the cuffs on the table to pull his hands behind his back and recuff them there. Paul was compliant.

Emma banged on the one-way mirror. “No!” she roared. “No, please, Paul, No!”

The sound of her fist against the mirror startled the three people in the other room. Paul, true to form, jumped. Somehow, he was looking her directly in the eye.

As Lee’s hands braced Emma’s shoulders, gently lowering her back into her wheelchair and murmuring soothing things in her ear, Lerman led Paul out of the interrogation room. Paul said something to the mirror that Emma couldn’t hear since the audio feed had cut out, but she was able to read his lips.

“I’m sorry, Emma.”


	9. The Universal Truth of Love...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paul is alone.

Fortunately for Paul, PEIP decided not to kill him.

They gave him many tests. They drew his blood, checked his breathing, asked him to sing sixteen bars – they chose Aladdin this time – and to do a grapevine. All without backing music, for which Paul was grateful. Not just because he would look less ridiculous, but mostly because the thought of music made him queasy.

Apparently, his singing had been bad enough that PEIP believed Paul when he told them he was no longer under the meteor’s control.

Or, the “meteorite’s” control. When Special Agent Lee – or Xander, as he told Paul to call him – came to visit him, he explained that once a space rock touched down on Earth, it was a meteorite. Paul didn’t care, but Xander seemed to, so he was trying to amend his language for Xander’s sake.

After determining Paul wasn’t just pretending to be himself as a ploy to overtake PEIP – again – Colonel Schaffer situated him in a two-room holding cell. How PEIP had fashioned it from a regular hospital room Paul didn’t know. It was windowless, with linoleum floors and slightly-off-white walls. It was just big enough for Paul not to feel cramped. The only piece of furniture was a bed made of white metal piping with white sheets. The second room was a tiny bathroom, just as white and austere as the bedroom. It distantly reminded him of his freshman dorm.

Once he got there, Colonel Schaffer handed him new clothes. Instead of his black suit – how PEIP had gotten a hold of his suit jacket was another mystery he didn’t want to solve – she gave him a white cotton T-shirt and a pair of soft grey sweatpants. He assumed they were clothes given to new PEIP recruits or something. He thanked her sincerely for them. Paul was more than ready to take off his slacks and tie.

After that, she merely told him that they would keep him posted on any updates with the vaccine and left his room.

Once she was gone, Paul went into the bathroom to change clothes. Even though he was alone, he knew there had to be at least one camera watching him. He spotted one of them as soon as he left the bathroom. The apple-sized black ball was hard to miss amid the snowstorm of his room. He knew there was probably another one somewhere, and he found it under the basin of his bathroom sink two days later.

At least what he thought was two days later. He had no clocks or access to daylight. Sure, an armed PEIP agent would bring him meals regularly, but they weren’t themed around the time of day. The theme seemed to be “whatever the cafeteria had in stock”. Four meals in a row were egg-based. Maybe the first one had been breakfast, and the next two were because they cooked a metric fuckton of eggs, and the last one was eggs again because it was breakfast again, so just finish the damn eggs, Paul. But maybe he was always on leftover duty, and they just had a shitload of eggs, so Paul was stuck eating a bunch of them.

What had really screwed over his sense of time was his decision to take a nap immediately after he was put in his room. He knew what time it was when he got there, but he had no clue how long he’d slept. Five minutes or five hours, anything was possible. He decided to just assume he hadn’t slept through dinner. He had never done that as a kid, it was unlikely he’d do it now.

Though his sleeping was a lot shittier now than it was as a kid. He hadn’t woken up from nightmares as a kid. He’d had the occasional bad dream, everyone did. But now he had at least one bad dream every night, and the flavors of his nightmares were more varied than the flavors of his meals. Some nights, he’d jolt awake, his face wet and aching, the beginnings of a wail of sorrow on his tongue.

As time passed, Paul mind warred with itself over whether or not he’d made a huge mistake. The one thing Paul always tried to avoid, aside from musicals, was time alone with his thoughts. In the words of his old therapist, he was a chronic overthinker with deep-seeded self-esteem issues. If left alone with his thoughts for too long, he would find clever ways to berate himself until he believed he was the scum of the earth.

So of course, in a brilliant, recursive move he never would have thought himself capable of, that part of him used the knowledge of its own existence as a way to make him feel stupid. Because he knew what he was like. He’d experienced firsthand why complete isolation was really bad for him. He should have known that he was going to do this to himself. But his dumb ass had agreed to solitary confinement anyway.

And it wasn’t like he was special in that regard. It was a known fact, studied and proven, that people went crazy in solitary. Delusions, emotional distress, claustrophobia, to name a few possibilities. It was reserved for heinous criminals, and he’d volunteered!

And that was only the beginning.

When he felt himself starting to attack, he would look down at his mark. That was why he went into solitary. For Emma.

Emma was on the other side of the walls of his room, somewhere in the hospital. She had gone through hell and back to survive this long, and she nearly hadn’t made it because of him.

A little fewer than half of the times he fell asleep he dreamt of waking up from the infection. Seeing Emma’s face twisted in agony and fear, cowering against the wall, look small and shattered. Mourning not only her life, but his. Knowing that he had been the one to threaten her life, to make her feel as broken as she looked. It all made his heart split in two.

He never, ever wanted to do that again, if he could prevent it. And the vaccine was the best way he could see to do that. He was still infected, even though he wasn’t a puppet for a space rock anymore. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was infect her, too.

Though, as Paul thought about it – in the near infinite amount of time he had to think – he wondered if he had ever been contagious at all. One of the few memories he had from being infected was suspicious.

Why hadn’t Paul been the one to infect the nurse? It made more sense for him to do it, he was a patient, she was vulnerable around him, he wouldn’t have needed to jump her. He could have just dragged her face in and been done with it.

But the meteorite had sent Ted in to do it. Why?

Was Paul not able to infect other people?

It was possible. He’d been infected differently from everyone else. Instead of swallowing the blue shit, he’d breathed in spores until he’d lost himself. He remembered at Beanies, the customers had been unconscious for about a minute after drinking the blue shit hidden in their coffee before they were fully infected. Paul hadn’t been fully infected until sometime after the blast. Maybe he was a unique case of the infection that never became contagious.

Even if that was true, he still needed a vaccine. The Hive’s typical first step of infection was murder. If he ever succumbed to the Hive again, he would attempt to kill her. And if he succeeded, she would just die if he wasn’t able to infect her.

Paul couldn’t endanger Emma like that, and selfishly, he couldn’t live with the fear that he might.

In a fucked up way, he was protecting her, and that was enough to justify staying in solitary.

He did his best to distract himself from the thoughts he didn’t want to have, but it was hard when he was the only thing in the room. He decided to pace, thinking that walking around a bit could be good for him. The walking turned to jogging in place, which turned to pushups and jumping jacks and burpees and squats. Paul had never been a home gym kind of guy, but the physical exertion shut his brain off.

After round four of eggs, Doctor Hughes visited carrying a folded pile of clothing that looked a lot like the clothes he was already wearing.

“Hi, Doctor Hughes,” Paul greeted with a smile, pausing at the top of a pushup.

“Hiya, Paul,” he returned, closing the door behind him. “How are you holding up?”

Paul adjusted himself to sit cross-legged on the floor, wiping some sweat from his forehead. “Oh, you know, a little tired, considering…” he trailed off, not wanting to sound cocky about how many reps he was doing. Also, Doctor Hughes wasn’t a skinny guy. Paul guessed that he must be built under the lab coat if the size of his shoulders were any indication. Whatever number of reps Paul might be proud of would be nothing to Doctor Hughes.

Doctor Hughes smirked. “Yeah, I’ll bet you’re tired. The boys watching the cameras say you’ve been at it for the past hour and a half.”

“Is that how long it’s been?” Paul hadn’t thought it had been that long. Exercise was working out.

“Yeah, it’s…” Doctor Hughes looked around the room for a clock. Seeing none, he sent a confused look to Paul. “Do you not have a clock anywhere in here?”

Paul shook his head, panting.

Doctor Hughes closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. After taking a deep breath, he looked back at Paul.

“I’ll make sure you get one soon, Paul.” He stepped closer. “I brought you a change of clothes. I hope you don’t mind that it’s the same thing you’re already wearing.”

“No, that’s fine. Thanks,” Paul said as he took the clothes from Doctor Hughes.

“Now, I came by to do a quick physical on you, but I’m going to wait until after your heart rate has gone down. It’ll be just like a yearly check-up. I’m going to look in your ear, test your reflexes, all that good stuff.”

“Ask me to breathe?” Paul asked jokingly between pants.

Dr. Hughes laughed. “Yeah, that, too. We just want to make sure you’re doing okay.”

“Okay,” he echoed.

The room went quiet. The awkwardness was palpable.

“Can you tell me the truth, Doctor Hughes?”

“About what?”

“Is this physical just another way to check to see if I’m infected?”

Doctor Hughes hung his head. “Yeah, that’s why they’re asking me to do it.”

“How bad were the MRI results? They must have been awful to warrant so many examinations.”

Dr. Hughes grimaced. “I’m afraid that information is confidential.”

“I’m not allowed to know about the state of my own health?”

His face scrunched regretfully. “No.”

Frustration was bubbling up in Paul’s gut. “What the fuck? What purpose does that serve? What do they think will happen if I know how infected I am?”

“I don’t know, Paul. I’m not an agent of PEIP, I just work at the hospital.”

“Wait. You’re not one of theirs?”

“No. I’m just as in dark as you are about a lot of this, but Colonel Schaffer insists that the discretion is for everyone’s sake, including yours.”

Paul sighed tetchily through his nose. For his own sake. Jesus, what did they expect would happen? That he would snap back into the infected state, powerless to the meteorite?

“Okay.”

Wait. Maybe that’s exactly what they expected. What if he snapped back into it as easily as he snapped out of it? What if he was just one errant note away from losing his free will again?

“Okay, okay.”

But no. That was ridiculous. There wasn’t another presence in his head vying for control. He would know if there was. He’d felt that before. No, he was alone in his head. There was no chance of him turning back into a singing puppet.

“Okay.” 

If only they’d just ask him that, instead of focusing on these damn physical examinations. No matter how much blue shit was in his system, his mind was free. He’d probably just flush it all out eventually, right?

“Okay.”

Maybe that’s what they were monitoring. Keeping an eye on his body and making sure he was flushing it all out. And maybe they were keeping him in the dark for some doctor-y. don’t-get-your-hopes-up reason. That made sense.

“Fine. Okay.”

Dr. Hughes’ face twisted with worry. “Alright, I’m going to be back in thirty minutes for that physical, okay?”

Paul looked up at Dr. Hughes. “Okay.”

The physical went as well as Paul could expect. From what he remembered, his body responded how it was supposed to. His leg even kicked out when Doctor Hughes smacked the little mallet under his knee. They were quiet for the whole thing until Doctor Hughes joked that he would have measured Paul’s blood pressure, but something was telling him to wait until later for more accurate results.

Doctor Hughes left and came back not long after with a clock and a hammer.

“You didn’t steal that from some random hallway, did you?” Paul asked, only half-joking.

“I plead the fifth,” Doctor Hughes responded. He sounded too serious for Paul’s comfort.

But now there was a clock in his room, and it was already doing wonders for his sanity. He now knew he had been in isolation for nearly three days and that he’d slept about as much as he thought he had at a time that actually was night. Paul had always known he found comfort in structure, and just knowing the time of day allowed him to try to formulate a routine. It was challenging to do, with so few activities to fill a routine with. But, looking down at his wrist, he knew he had to make the best of it. For Hatchetfield. For Emma.

For himself.

That was something his mom had always tried to tell him. That he should try to do good things just for himself simply because he deserved his own love. He had always had trouble with that, even as a kid, but what better time to better himself than in solitary, right?

He wasn’t just isolating himself for Emma or for all of Hatchetfield’s citizens, even though they were a huge part of the reason. He also just didn’t want to be a singing and dancing puppet for a hive mind. He wanted a cure for himself as much as he wanted a cure for Bill, Ted, and the rest.

Was it selfish? Fundamentally, yes, but it wasn’t wrong to want to keep his free will and to make sacrifices to try to keep it.

It was okay to be selfish sometimes.

And yikes, did it take a lot of agonizing to reach that thought. Over thirty years of experience with his own personality told him to lash out against it. Being selfish was wrong, and a self-serving mentality inevitably leads to harmful actions against others. People are supposed to try to be selfless and giving wherever they can.

Emma’s voice in his head told him to fuck all that.

There was a line, Paul determined. If getting himself cured could protect people in the long term, he was justified in doing it for himself.

On the fourth day, Doctor Hughes took some blood from Paul for examination. Thankfully, he had given blood before, so he knew how to keep himself from fainting.

After a week, Xander visited again. He asked Paul how he was doing, a question Paul was asked every day that he was getting tired off.

“If I’m honest, Xander, I think I’m losing my mind. I’ve been sitting in a room doing nothing for a week. I’m about a day away from pulling my own hair out.”

“That’s perfectly understandable, Paul, and that’s also why I’m here.”

He sent Xander a confused look.

“I wanted to ask if there was anything I could get for you to ease the boredom. A book, maybe? A jigsaw puzzle?”

Paul sighed loudly with joy as his head fell into his hands. “Yes, Xander, please. God, some books would be amazing.”

“Great,” Xander said cheerily. “Any titles in particular you’d like to request? I can bring you as many books as I can carry.”

Paul considered his options. He had always been an avid reader. His living room back in Hatchetfield boasted two and a half completely full floor to ceiling bookshelves. He never bragged about it – he didn’t think reading was a primary factor in making people smart – but he was silently very proud of his collection.

But he was a bit of a picky reader. He was open to just about any type of book, and he finished everything he started, but reread very few books. Which ones did he really want to read again?

One came to mind right away. “ _The Name of the Wind_.”

“Okay,” said Xander, taking out a tablet to write that down.

Paul thought some more. “Um, _Good Omens_ , _Brave New World…_ ”

“Any others?”

Paul shrugged. “Sure. If anyone around PEIP has any recommendations, I’d be willing to give it a shot. I like most anything.”

“Sure thing. How many books do you want? A pile or a mountain?”

“How long do you think I’ll be here?”

“Mountain, it is. I’ll get you some other things to pass the time, too, Paul.”

“Thanks, Xander.”

“Not a problem. I’ll be back tomorrow with your new library.”

Xander had meant that and the mountain comments as a joke, but he returned the next day with a stack of books so high, he could barely see over it. Paul walked over and took about half of the books from him so he could close the door.

On the top of the stack, Paul saw a brand new copy of _The Name of the Wind._ Looking at it felt bittersweet. He hadn’t realized how attached he’d grown to his copy of the book with the cracks down the spine and the faded colors on the cover.

“What I learned yesterday,” Xander said. “was that if you ever want to get all of PEIP talking for hours, ask them about books. I swear, once I started asking around about book recommendations, I got no other work done.” Paul set his stack down on the round table a PEIP agent had brought him the day before, and Xander followed suit.

Xander then talked about all of the books he had produced for him. He first got _The Name of the Wind_ and its sequel _The Wise Man’s Fear._ Then he got the other two books Paul had asked for specifically. Apparently, the mention of _Good Omens_ led to a long discussion about the separate works of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, so Xander had thrown in a couple of Gaiman’s novels – _American Gods_ and _Stardust_ – and the first five books of the Discworld series.

“I keep hearing Discworld is good, I just never had the time to read it.” Paul said.

“Well, you have plenty of time, now.”

There were others, too. Bram Stoker’s _Dracula, Hidden Figures_ , and more. Paul was almost getting dizzy trying to decide which one to start with.

“Now, if you like _The Name of the Wind,_ ” Xander said, pulling a huge book from the stack. “My recommendation is The Stormlight Archive series. It’s a great example of epic fantasy. It’s huge and dense, but it’s a page turner.”

“Thank you, Xander. This is amazing. I can’t even tell you how grateful I am for all of this.”

“Wait,” he said, putting _The Way of Kings_ back on the table. “There’s one more.”

Xander pulled a book from behind his back, where Paul had noticed he usually kept his tablet. The book was small, dwarfed by the brick he’d just held. Unlike the rest of the books Xander had brought, this one wasn’t brand new. It was still in good condition, but some faded whites and minor dents in the paperback cover gave the impression that this book had been read once or twice.

He handed it to Paul. The only cover art was an inch-wide picture of a Ferris wheel. It was _The Five People You Meet in Heaven_.

“You remember when General McNamara was talking to you about the ‘universal truth of love and the strength of the human heart’? And he asked if you wanted to do some light reading on the subject?”

Paul nodded. He had told Xander about that when they first talked about a week ago.

“Well, about half the time when he says that, he means exactly what you probably thought he meant. He’ll pull out hundreds of pages of real life testimonials about people overcoming insurmountable odds out of love for someone else. The other half of the time, he means that book.

“I’ve known John for many years, and I’ve seen him loan out that book to just about everyone he knows. He says he learns everything he needs to know about a person from how they interpret it and what themes they pick up on. He reads that book every time he’s about to go out on a long assignment. He reads it when he hasn’t been on assignment for a long time and he’s just been pushing paperwork. I’ve seen John read that book maybe a hundred times. I don’t know how his copy hasn’t disintegrated by now.

“If he had been here to recommend a book for you, he would have instantly charged down the hall, burst through your door, and pushed his copy of the book into your hands without taking ‘no’ for an answer.

“That,” he pointed to the book in Paul’s hands. “is my copy. It was the first gift he ever gave me. I haven’t read it nearly as many times as John has, but I’ve read it a few times. I reread it a week ago, right after we took him into custody.”

Xander fell silent. Paul hadn’t known before now that General McNamara and Xander had such a close relationship. It was clear that General McNamara being infected for so long was getting to Xander.

He took a deep breath. “I always thought this was a weird book for him to pick to be the epitome of the strength of love and the human heart, because that’s not really what the book is about. It’s more about life and relationships and what our actions can mean to other people. But if you could hear the way John talks about it, you’d get what he means.”

Xander nodded to himself and headed for the door. “I can’t wait to hear what you think about it.”

“Xander,” Paul said. He paused in the doorway. “Thank you.”

“Hey, I want that book back when you’re done, you know,” he said with an accusatory point “You can keep all of the rest of them, but I’m not letting you keep the first gift John gave me.”

Paul smiled. “You got it.”

And with that, Xander left.

Paul had no more questions about which book to read first. He sat down in his bed with Xander’s copy of _The Five People You Meet in Heaven_.

It was just shy of two hundred pages, so Paul was finished before the end of the day, but he spent the rest of the evening and a large chunk of the next morning thinking about that book. Xander had been right, it was about life and relationships. It was blindingly clear that the fundamental truth at the core of the novel was that everyone’s life is affected by many, many other people’s lives, both in ways that are obvious and ways that are not. Sometimes a single event kicked off by someone you didn’t know can change your whole life. Other times a person can be present for your entire life and change it in little ways until you’re a new person.

While he was thinking, his eyes caught his wrist. Suddenly, he understood why this was General McNamara’s favorite book.

Because life and love were connected. They caused each other. Love brought new life into the world. The overlap of different lives brought about love. Love made life better, and the finite nature of life made love more special.

God, he and General McNamara were saps.

In the end, Paul thought it was a great book, and even though most of it took place in the afterlife, it gave Paul more strength to keep living.

The days passed by much quicker with the books, and jigsaw puzzles, and light weights that Xander brought. The anxious, tingling feeling just underneath his skin that Paul hadn’t even noticed had been steadily growing was finally dying down. Sleep was less restless. But every time someone came by to give him food, pick him up for a blood test or an MRI, Paul always asked the same question:

“When will I be able to visit Emma?”

He’d asked that since day one. And every time they gave the same answer:

“Not yet.”

He did his best to be patient with them. They weren’t making that decision, that was Colonel Schaffer, but he was starting to get frustrated. He’d been cooperative with solitary confinement. He’d given all the blood – cheek, hair, urine – samples the research team had asked for. He’d taken and passed every test they threw at him. He never yelled, he never fought.

Yet, it had been three weeks since he had seen Emma. He could only imagine the hell she was giving them on the other side.

He hoped she was okay.

The traitorous side of his mind wondered if she had left Clivesdale. Gone to wherever PEIP had set her new life up and was being Kelly Kline right now.

Fortunately, that thought was easy to shake off. He remembered the last time he saw her. How tightly she had clung to his jacket, demanding to stay with him. He knew she didn’t want to abandon him here while she started a new life.

It was harder to shake the thought that she thought that he was okay with abandoning her.

It was easy to rationalize. He had been the one to tell her they would only be separated for a little while, and now it had been three goddamn weeks, and he had been the one to volunteer for the separation. He didn’t regret the decision, but he could see how it might hurt her.

And what if she hadn’t been behind that one-way mirror like he’d assumed she would be? What if she wasn’t there to see him apologize to her? What if she had been there but she couldn’t read lips?

All he wanted was to see her again, no matter the circumstances. He had so many things he wanted to say to her. He was dying to know how she was holding up. His heart felt like it was being stretched and squished the longer he had to wait.

But he knew he had to. PEIP wasn’t telling him the results of any of the examinations they had given him. He had no clue how infected he had been at the start of isolation, and he had even less of an idea about how infected he was now. They hadn’t come by with any vaccine trials, so it was likely that he was just as infected now as he had been then. All he knew was that he hadn’t had any urge to sing, dance, or choke up blue shit for three weeks.

He had to be patient. He wasn’t willing to risk Emma’s safety. If keeping her safe from himself meant not seeing her, then that’s what he would do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, a few notes:  
> 1.) PEIP is an organization full of nerds and Xander is their king. You can't tell me otherwise.   
> 2.) There were a lot of book titles in here. "The Name of the Wind" is Jon Matteson's favorite book, but my three favorites are "Brave New World", "Good Omens", and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven". Check out all of them if you can, the last one is definitely the most approachable.  
> 3.) If y'all couldn't tell, Doctor Hughes was played by Joe Walker in my head.  
> 4.) Thanks for reading!


	10. Beefing It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma sees Paul for the first time in weeks

He was there waiting for her when she arrived, once again cuffed to the table. The smile he sent her when she came through the door was blinding and the most beautiful thing she had seen in a long time.

Her pace quickened to almost-running when she saw him and she sat down in the chair across from him as fast as she could, his name falling from her lips as if whatever had been holding it back had been pulled away. She reached as far as she could across the table and found that, yes, fucking _yes,_ she could reach his hands to hold them. She had been touch-starved before the Catastrophe, but the events of the past two months had made it even worse.

For a moment, they just sat there, basking in each other’s relieved smiles. She had so many things she wanted to say to him, but she was speechless. God, she could drown in his eyes and she’d fucking thank him for it. Looking at them in person for the first time in six weeks reminded her of snorkeling in Lake Atitlán, watching the sun stream in ribbons in the crystalline water around her. How did he get so lucky to have such good eyes? How did she get so lucky to get to be the one who those eyes directed such a soft and affectionate look to?

“Emma,” Paul breathed, rubbing circles into her hand with his thumb, as if he could fuse their hands together so they wouldn’t be apart again.

In normal circumstances, Emma was an independent spirit. She liked to do her own thing without worrying that it would butt heads with someone else. She always imagined her soulmate would be the kind of person who was willing to be along or the ride when she wanted them to be or sit back when she didn’t. She hated it when people were clingy with her.

In this case, though, she could make an exception. She had seen what Paul had been through for the past six weeks. Not only was PEIP monitoring Paul while he was in isolation, they were recording him and filing away every minute of those six weeks for “research”.

It was just one of the reasons Emma was fucking infuriated with PEIP. When Paul had talked to Xander about everything that happened to him since the Catastrophe and explained that it was spores that had infected him and not the blue goo shit, Emma had volunteered to be a part of the research team. Out of sheer boredom, she had wandered over to their lab and asked about what they were doing. She found out that no one on Xander’s team was a botanist. Greenwood was a microbiologist, but she still knew very little about plants, and the dark circles under her eyes made her look like she’d been working nonstop since she was born. Xander was a theoretical physicist and the other two were chemists. Emma had begun telling Xander off about how of course they weren’t making any progress because they had no fucking clue what they were dealing with. And sure, maybe she was only a third-year botany student, but she still knew more about spores than Xander’s fucking A-Team. Xander then let her examine a sample they got from one of the infected, challenging her to put her money where her mouth was.

Emma had become an honorary member of Xander’s Shitty A-Team – the geek was calling them “The X-Men” – ever since.

Now a part of the research team, Emma knew they weren’t using the hours of footage of Paul in captivity for jack shit. The only person on the team who watched any of it was Emma.

She played it at four times speed most of the time because most of what Paul did involved sitting still, though it was kind of funny to watch him do lightning-fast push-ups. Even sped up, though, watching that first week had been brutal. He had run his hand through his hair so much and so roughly she thought it would all fall out. His face would go from blank to horrified to self-hating in slow transitions. He cried. A lot. He would shoot glances to the camera before he would start crying, and she watched as he tried to play it down. He tried to keep his shoulders steady and he’d turn his face away. But every few minutes his breath would hitch and there would be no denying it.

He tossed and turned in his sleep. After a while, she noticed his lips moving and slowed the video back down. He talked in his sleep sometimes, but most of what he said was “I’m sorry” and “No, please” and “I don’t want to hurt her” and “Emma”. He said “Emma” in his sleep a lot, and it was never in a tone that sounded happy in any way.

In spite of the turmoil he suffered, he woke like he never remembered what he dreamed, even when he was startled awake in the middle of the night.

After that first week, all of the bad stuff receded a bit. He started sleeping better – not great, he still had the odd nightmare, but at least they didn’t wake him up – he stopped crying during the day altogether, and he stopped making that haunted, loathing face down at his knees.

Seeing him in person for the first time in too goddamn long, Emma had so many things she wanted to say, but PEIP wasn’t allowing her to say most of it. They weren’t allowing her to tell him about the progress they were making with the vaccine, which wasn’t much, but it was something. They weren’t allowing her to tell him about the results of the thousands of physicals they had performed on him. She wasn’t allowed to tell him that even after that first MRI on the day they’d detained him, the spore content, as they now knew it was, was so tiny, it was barely noticeable. She couldn’t mention that for the first two weeks the spore content had gone down before bottoming out at only a small amount of parts per million. That for two weeks in isolation, his body had been healing him on its own, but for a month afterward, it had stopped. She wanted to tell him about the apprehensive feelings she was getting about Schaffer now. Ever since his spore count had bottomed out, she had been acting more cagey and secretive than normal. She worried Schaffer was planning something Emma really wasn’t going to like.

She wanted to tell him all of that, but Schaffer was for sure behind the one-way mirror, and she would have Emma’s ass if she breathed a word of it to him.

“It’s great to see you again,” Paul said. “You have no idea how much I missed you.”

Considering how many times Paul had stared down at his left wrist while in isolation, Emma thought she had some idea. “It’s great to see you, too, Paul.”

“How have you been doing? Is your leg getting better?”

“Yeah, it is. My PT says only a couple more weeks of therapy and rest and I should be all healed up.”

“That’s great!”

“Yeah, I would have been pissed if it gave me a fucking limp. I want to go on hikes again.”

“Are there good hiking trails in Colorado?”

“There’s gotta be. Why, are you a hiker, Matthews?”

“Uh, no, but it sounds fun. I’d love to try it.”

“You’d love it, Paul. No one fucking bothers you on a hike. It’s just you, the sky above you, the ground below you, and some killer views.”

“Did you see some killer views in Guatemala?”

“God, the views there were to die for. One day, I timed it just right that I spent the whole day making it up a mountain and reached the peak right at sunset. I’m telling you, Paul, it made Hatchetfield look gray, the colors were so amazing. I don’t actually like the color orange that much, but when I saw that sunset over a horizon of trees and roofs, I fell in love.”

“I wish I could have seen it.”

“Ugh, I’ll never forget it. Sights like that one were what made me want to keep hiking. Even if I never see something like that again.”

She looked back over, and Paul had that adoring look on his face, but this time, he didn’t hide it.

“How about you, Paul? Have you been okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, as if he were just discovering the answer for himself. “It’s been rough sometimes, but I’m doing okay.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

Paul had a strength to him, one that wasn’t obvious right away. One that maybe hadn’t been noticeable until recently. She was coming to admire it.

His smile faded and was replaced by a guilty expression. “I’m sorry, Emma.”

He had to stop saying that. She was going to lose her mind. At least now, she could ask. “What for?”

“I left you behind when the one thing you wanted from me was to stay with you. I told you I’d be back soon, and we haven’t seen each other for six weeks.”

He was talking to the table and he looked like he was going to continue. She had to stop him.

“Now, hold on, that last part is Schaffer’s fault, not yours. And I know why you turned yourself in, Paul. I get it. You don’t have to apologize.”

“Maybe, but I still feel bad about it.”

“Then don’t. Paul, you’re doing this so you can help people, including your friends. You’re making a huge sacrifice so you can save them. Don’t worry about my feelings about it. I mean, sure, it sucks that I don’t get to see you, since you’re literally the only other normal person in this entire fucking hospital, but it’s just temporary. We’re going to get out of here, and once we do, I’m putting you on a goddamn leash like that one little kid back in Hatchetfield.”

“There’s a kid on a leash in Hatchetfield?”

“Uh-huh. His mother drinks a lot of coffee. Shocker, I know.”

“Completely floored.”

“Paul,” she said after a moment. “let’s talk about anything other than all this shit.” She gestured sporadically around the room. “I think we could both use just a little while where we can forget about the apocalypse.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. What do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. Um…” She scavenged her brain for some shitty icebreakers. Any of them could probably work on Paul. “Tell me about the best day of your life. And don’t say any sappy, mark-related shit. I don’t want to vomit all over you.”

“What, again?”

“Again?” she asked, scandalized. “I never fucking vomited on you!”

“No, but you did cough blood right into my open mouth.”

“Why the fuck was your mouth open? It was supposed to be a kiss, not CPR.”

“My lips were parted, and blood got in. That’s open enough.” His eyes got wide and glazed over, reliving the horror. His face had gotten red.

She chuckled. She decided to ease up on him a bit. “Come on, Paul. You’re supposed to be talking about good memories.”

He took a calming breath. “Right. Best day…” He pursed his lips and squeezed her hand. Then, his lips turned up.

“I think my favorite day was probably my seventh birthday. Mom took me out to the lake. It was overcast, and there must have been a threat of a storm because we had the beach to ourselves. We spent the whole day there, just doing beach stuff. Mom even let me bury her and carve a mermaid tail around her legs as long as I turned the page on the book she was reading. It was just…fun. Plain and simple. Nothing to complicate it. Once the day was over, I was so tired, I fell asleep on the car ride home and slept until the next morning. So I didn’t even open my birthday gift until the day after my actual birthday.”

“So was it just you and your mom, or…?”

“Yeah, just me and Mom. She liked to call us ‘The Dynamic Duo’.”

Emma huffed a laugh. “The nerd apple doesn’t fall far from the nerd tree.”

“Yeah, she was the best. I think she called us that for her sake almost as much as she did for mine.” His face turned fond and melancholic.

“She had it rough. She got pregnant at eighteen. When she told her boyfriend about it, he told her to get an abortion because he didn’t want to be a father yet. When she told her parents about it, they told her to put the baby up for adoption because they weren’t going to support both her and the baby for the next eighteen years. She had known from the beginning she wanted to keep me, or at least keep me close by. She tried to find someone close to her to adopt me, an aunt or a friend or a neighbor, but no one would. Her parents kept pressuring her to agree to dump me off at an orphanage, but she didn’t want to. If there’s two things to know about my mom, it’s that she loves kids and hates being told what to do. So she just left. Packed her bags and moved far away to Hatchetfield.”

“Wait, you’re not from a long line of Hatchetfield natives?”

“Nope, I’m first generation.”

“Never would have guessed.”

“Do I really blend in that well? I wasn’t sure if I was selling it.”

“You said you never wanted to leave Hatchetfield. That’s like, peak Hatchetfield.”

Paul shrugged.

“So, your mom just moved out and raised you on her own?”

“Yup. For those first few years, she was balancing taking care of a baby, paying rent, getting her education degree to become a certified daycare worker, and working a part-time job. She even took babysitting gigs at night while she was watching me. She always told me she was glad I was such a content baby because it made those jobs a lot easier. She said if I was as bad as some of the kids she babysat, she would have pulled her hair out years ago.

“You know, when I was – god, I was twelve years old, that was almost twenty years ago – my mom got a letter from her parents. They wanted to meet me and put the whole ‘ordeal’ behind us. Mom was furious. They had the balls to try to contact her and not even apologize for disowning her?”

“They disowned her?”

“Yeah, she got served not long after she moved into Hatchetfield. So, yeah, Mom was pissed, but she told me the decision was mine whether or not I met my grandparents.” He paused, rubbing his thumb absently against her hand. “I chose not to. Mom sent them a kindly-worded fuck off letter, and that was that. I never met my grandparents. Not even at her funeral.”

Emma’s heart sank. Not long after Paul had gone into isolation, PEIP had informed her that they had brought in a couple other infected people. Due to limited space, they could only keep so many infected people in the hospital. The rest had to be monitored in Hatchetfield. They had prioritized family of the other people they had in the hospital. Tom and Tim had been brought in. Bill’s daughter. Paul’s boss’ wife. But there had been a distinct lack of any of Paul’s family. At first, she had been pissed that they would purposefully leave his family out to dry, but a small part of her wondered if he simply hadn’t had any family to rescue. Now she had her answer.

“Oh,” she said. “so, your mom is…?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Uh, six years ago. Heart attack.”

“That sucks.” The silence got heavier.

“Yeah, but I try not to think about it too much. She was a great mom, and that’s what matters.” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t even notice her parents weren’t there until weeks later. I try not to get angry about it. They could just as easily be dead, too, for all I know.” He shook his head. “But yeah. Sorry, this was supposed to be about good memories.”

“Don’t sweat it, Paul.”

He turned back to her. “What about you? What’s your favorite day?”

“Oh, probably that mountain at sunset. I hiked with a small canvas and some paints, so I got some painting in, too. It was perfect.”

“You paint?”

“Not much anymore. I don’t have the time. But back in Guatemala, yeah. I’ve always been an artsy type. I was more into sketching in high school, though.”

“And theater.”

“Hey, that was a one-time thing. A friend of mine roped me into it. He tricked me into thinking I might have fun. And sure, the performance was kind of fun, but the rest of it was horseshit. Theater types are the _worst_.”

“Ugh.”

“They never fucking shut up. They’re always either singing some obnoxious showtune or they’re gossiping together in their little cliques. I swear, there are no more judgmental, catty people than theater kids. And they never fucking grow out of it! Zoey and all her shitty little friends are just as judgy as any high schooler, but now they have this sense of superiority over me because I’m older than they are but we’re all in the same shitty coffee shop.”

Emma sighed. “If I never watch a musical again, it’ll be too soon.”

“Amen.”

They chuckled together, and then the room went silent. They were both looking at their entwined hands.

“Actually,” Emma said quietly. “I think it’s a tie. There was also this one day when I was a kid. Jane and I were playing pretend. She was nine, I was six. She always liked to play out pretend scenarios where she could plan things, and she liked to have me be her assistant. That day she decided she wanted to play wedding planner, and I thought that sounded fun. We spent the whole afternoon dragging our toys out into the backyard to make this garden wedding setup. We wove dandelions into flower crowns , we made bouquets out of some of Mom’s tall grass. We made a truly impressive wedding cake out of mud. It was way taller than it had any right to be. Then, we played dress up and pretended to be the bride and groom, with me as the groom, of course. Jane swiped one of Mom’s necklaces and I put on Dad’s shoes. We said pretend vows and instead of a kiss on the forehead like she told me to do, I licked the palm of my hand and swiped it across her face. She chased me around the yard until she nabbed me and gave me a noogie. After that, we rearranged everything to be the reception, but we called it the ‘party part’. Jane brought out her Walkman and we danced to an ABBA Greatest Hits CD. We did that until Mom called us in for dinner.

“That was the best Jane and I ever got along. I mean, we didn’t fight much as kids, but I usually thought her games were boring and she usually thought mine were too dirty or reckless or childish or something. We got along fine, we just didn’t have much of a connection. We didn’t like the same things. But that day felt, to me, like what sisterhood was supposed to be, you know? Well, you don’t because you’re an only child, but you get it.”

“That sounds really nice.”

“I always think about that day whenever I think of Jane. Even when she was alive. It’s like, why couldn’t we be that close? Nothing stopped us that day from being sisters and having fun, what stopped us every other day? I always thought it was probably something I was doing. I always thought about that when she would try to get me to come back to Hatchetfield when I was in Guatemala. We wouldn’t be any closer as sisters if I just came back, so what was the point?”

Paul squeezed her hand, and then released it. For a second, she wasn’t sure why he did it until she felt a tear fall down her cheek. She wiped it away with the hand Paul had surrendered.

“God, all of this alien bullshit is really fucking with my emotions. I don’t normally cry this easily.” Paul said nothing.

“When I came back to Hatchetfield, I swore I would make an effort to be closer to Tim, her son. I want to make up for being distant for so goddamn long. But Tom, her husband, fucking hates me, so I never get to see Tim. The only time I actually met him was at Jane’s funeral. It’s like, I’m trying so hard to be better, and he won’t even give me a shot to prove it. And the cherry on top of the misery sundae is the goddamn apocalypse!”

She reached her hand back out to the center of the table. Paul silently took it.

“I just want my shot to make things better. If not for Tom, Tim, or Jane, then for me. I have been beating myself up over this for _years_ and I just need some closure.”

She looked up at Paul. “I don’t think I said it before, but thanks for saving me back at Beanies. I would have been a goner for sure if you hadn’t shown up.”

He smiled. “Thanks for listening to the crazy guy screaming about musicals at nine in the morning. He really needed that.”

“Oh, I was not listening to you. If Nora and Zoey hadn’t started singing about poisoning people while people were literally being poisoned, I probably still would have reported you to the feds.”

“You listened eventually. That’s all that matters.”

“Whatever gets you through the night, Paul.”

He laughed quietly. God, he was such a dork.

“Man, we’re really beefing this first date,” she said. “You’re not really supposed to lay out all of your childhood trauma until at least date five.”

Paul looked at her, bewildered. “This is a date?”

“Why not? Everything else about our relationship is already so goddamn weird, we might as well have our first date in an interrogation room.”

“With Schaffer watching behind a one-way mirror?”

“What, is this not how you envisioned our first date?”

“I didn’t envision anything for our first date.” The denial came out too fast and his face was going red. He really was a shit liar.

“Of course you did, Paul. You’re marked. Every marked person imagines what their first date with their soulmate will be like.”

“Including you?”

“Yeah.”

“So, what was it like? Your perfect first date?”

“Hey, I asked you first!”

“And I told you, I didn’t envision anything.” He didn’t meet her eyes. She’d been holding his hands for a while, but they suddenly got noticeably sweatier. Emma hoped Schaffer was paying attention so she would know for sure that Paul had never lied to her because he was literally incapable of doing so.

“Bullshit. What are you worried about? Think I’ll call you a sap?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re a sap. Now, tell me about our first date.”

Paul hung his head and sighed, but Emma could see the corners of his mouth turned up.

“Fine. It’s nothing spectacular, really. I just pictured a nice lunch at that cute little café down Cedar, you know –”

“—Luna’s,” they said in sync.

“Yeah. We would just talk to each other about whatever came to mind over some salad.”

“Do you actually get salad when you go to Luna’s?”

“Yeah, I like salad.”

“So do I, but when I go to Domino’s I don’t get the wings, you know? If you go to Luna’s, you have to get a sandwich. Specifically, the applewood bacon sandwich.”

“I have, and it’s good, but I like their Caesar salad.”

“Man, I can’t believe your fantasy includes a Caesar salad from Luna’s.”

“What about yours, then? Is it any better?”

“Uh, duh. Mine doesn’t involve sacrilege.”

“Okay, let’s have it, then. What’s our perfect first date?”

“First of all, this is my perfect first date. I came up with this way before I knew you.”

“Fine, _your_ perfect first date.”

“If it has to be in Hatchetfield, which I guess it does,” Paul nodded. “then it would start with a picnic in Oakleigh Park. We’d eat sandwiches I packed –”

“You and your sandwiches,” Paul mused.

“Yes, my real soulmate, turkey on rye,” she joked. “We’d feed each other strawberries until we’re throwing them at each other. Then we’d go paddle-boating on the pond until you accidentally overturn the boat. We’d be soaked, and then we’d rush to your place – or mine, whichever is closer – to shower off, probably separately.”

“Probably?”

“Depends on who goes first. If I go first, you respect my boundaries and we take separate showers. If you go first, I get impatient and join you.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know, who’s house are we at?”

“I pass Oakleigh Park on my walk to work.”

“Your place. If we’re at your place, it’s up to you. What do we do next?”

Paul hummed in thought. Then, he grinned. “Depends on if we took separate showers.”

“Then who showers first, Paul?”

He blinked. “Probably me. I would insist that I would only need five minutes. If you get impatient and join me,” his eyes flicked daringly over to the one-way mirror. “then I probably do anything I can to keep you at my house as long as possible.”

“Won’t be hard, my apartment is a shithole. What are you gonna try?”

“Dinner?”

“That’ll do it.”

“I’ll ask you if you want to stay for dinner while we’re still in the shower, and my face will be bright red.”

Emma giggled. “Are you the kind of guy who waits for permission before they feel a girl up in the shower?”

Paul nodded. “One hundred percent.”

“Then I would start washing you off. Particularly your legs and feet because I’m sure you have a hard time reaching them, you tree. I’ll be bent down, eye-level with your hips. Do I get an eyeful?”

“Definitely.” Paul was starting to blush just at this conversation.

“Then I’d come back up and make sure you knew you had permission. And _then_ I’d agree to stay for dinner.”

“Oh, thank god. The suspense was killing me.”

Emma smiled. “What are you making for dinner?”

“I have no idea. I have some basic stuff in my fridge usually, but I’d be panicking trying to find something to impress you. I’d probably end up making grilled chicken or something.”

“Look, Paul, I was surviving off of ramen noodles and day-old Beanies pastries. The grilled chicken would have been amazing. And look, we ended up back at your date, kind of.”

“Without all of the unnecessary judgement about salads.”

“And, at the end of mine, we probably fuck.”

“Probably?”

“Depends on how good a kisser you were back in the shower.” During this whole conversation, Emma had been sneaking glances at Paul’s lips out of curiosity. How had she not noticed how full they were before now?

“Are you sure us falling into the pond was accidental? It sounds like a lot hinges on that little detail.”

“That’s life, Paul. Different choices lead us down different paths. The path to my ideal date ends in sex, so we have to have a good reason to get into the privacy of one of our homes and we have to get all horned up. Getting soaked in nasty pond water accomplishes both of those things.”

“That makes sense. It sucks then, that this is our first date.”

She shrugged. “Eh, we’ll make it work.”

He tilted his head. “We have gotten this far.”

Schaffer’s voice came over the intercom. “Alright, kids, time for Ben to get back to his room.”

Emma briefly forgot who “Ben” was. She hesitantly stood, still holding onto Paul’s hands.

“Hey, Em,” he said, that soft smile on his face. The “Some things are worth it” smile. The “I don’t think of you that way at all, Emma” smile. Now, he was putting another phrase onto it.

“I’ll see you soon.”


	11. Fit the Pattern

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paul does a lot of speculating

Finally being allowed to see Emma again was doing Paul’s mental state a lot of good. After six weeks of solitude, with only a handful of short visits from Xander and Dr. Hughes, he had been approaching the mania he’d felt after Mr. Davidson sang that weird song to him in his office.

But things had been getting easier. Paul had been able to formulate a routine once he’d had more to do than stare at the walls. He had a morning and evening workout schedule. He took morning showers and afternoon naps. He was burning through the books Xander brought. He was close to needing to request more. Structure was beginning to return to his life, and it didn’t feel so much like time was at a standstill.

He was able to visit Emma – under supervision – once a week for about fifteen minutes. It was definitely too short of a time, but he kept himself from complaining. He worried if he did, they would just stop allowing it. He also continued to have weekly brain scans along with a smattering of other physicals. A couple of times, he’d been pulled from his room spontaneously to get his blood drawn for the research team. They would not tell him what they were doing with it when he asked.

There were a lot of things they wouldn’t tell him. They never told him the results of all the MRIs or any of the other examinations. They were strangely silent about progress with the vaccine, too. They wouldn’t even let Emma tell him what she had been up to the whole time, which Paul found particularly odd.

He was starting to get nervous. The only explanation Paul could think of for PEIP being secretive about all of those things when they had told him before that they would keep him posted was that his results were bad. Maybe he had been more infected than he felt, and they were worried he would still be a threat. That would explain why they’d forced Emma to be quiet about what she did and where she went within the hospital. If he broke out and went on a singing rampage – just the thought made Paul feel gross – he wouldn’t know where to find her if he went looking for her.

He was pretty confident he would not do that, but PEIP might have some reason to think he would.

More weeks passed. Even though he wasn’t sitting and staring at the wall all day everyday anymore, the days still passed slowly. Paul longed to be able to binge a TV show to make the time go faster. Hell, even having all of his old work back would be a welcome change. What Paul wouldn’t give for a statistical analysis.

He wished he could sleep longer. He had hoped that by now he would have been able to fuck up his circadian rhythm enough that he could sleep in later and go to sleep earlier, but he had failed at that. Mostly because he still wasn’t sleeping great. The nightmares had gotten less frequent, but they were still a very present part of his life.

Some of his nightmares were based on real events. Like the nightmare about seeing Bill die, and then being puppeted around with glowing blue eyes and a bullet wound in his neck. Or the one about himself being torn to shreds by the hoard of body-snatchers in the theater. Or the one about waking up to Emma’s horrified, crying face directed at him as she sat huddled against the door to the stairwell. That old chestnut.

Some were based on some of Paul’s more irrational fears. Like the one where his mother came back, a rotting corpse with glowing eyes and a threatening smile. Or the one where they got Emma and the whole hospital and surrounded him.

But there was one that was a mixture of both, and it was the one he was starting to have more and more lately. He was in his body, wandering the halls of the hospital at night. He would wake from his bed and walk out of his room to follow the trail of a strand of music, singing a song he didn’t recognize.

Or, at least, he was pretty sure he didn’t. There was a niggling thought in the back of his mind saying he did know the song, and he knew it well, but he couldn’t place it. Paul couldn’t remember all of the lyrics after he woke up, but it had the word “inevitable” in it a lot?

It was a strange dream, one that still left him gasping when he woke from it. He always got the feeling he was looking for something that he couldn’t find. Whatever it was, Paul hoped the infected version of himself never found it.

That dream was starting to take over for all of the others. It was slowly becoming the only dream he ever had. He told himself it was a sign of progress. He wasn’t dreaming about Bill or his mom or Emma being infected and coming for him much anymore, so maybe that was a good sign. Maybe this wandering dream would just be one he dealt with for the rest of his life. A mental scar to remind him of what he had lived through.

As unsettling as the dream was in the moment, Paul could tell himself that it was much more like a normal dream than any of the others he’d had. Weird and cryptic, sure, but not overtly threatening. All dreams were weird and cryptic, so talking himself down from the heightened anxiety he felt when he awoke was easier to do with that dream than the others.

Not easy, but easier.

Sometimes, his method was to distract himself. He would think about what he would do once he was finally cleared to leave isolation.

The very first thing he would do was certain: hug Emma. It sounded so benign, but all he wanted to be able to do was take her in his arms. He couldn’t explain the desire, even to himself, but he knew as soon as he crossed the threshold of his room, he would rush to find her and scoop her up. Maybe it was because that’s just what people did once they were cured of a menacing illness. Maybe he was just starved for human contact. Maybe he just wanted to show her he was okay in the most direct way he could think of. All of those explanations made sense, but none of them felt right.

From there, he didn’t know for sure what would happen. Maybe, if the vaccine was done, PEIP would start curing all of the other infected people. Then, after maybe a week or so, they’d be allowed to go back to Hatchetfield. Paul and Emma could go back to their jobs. Paul would go back to his old routine where he got coffee at Beanies at 1:25 pm. He’d see Emma there. Neither of them would wear a patch. Why would they? They’d found each other, and no one else in Hatchetfield was marked. He and Emma would go out on a few dates before Paul would ask if she wanted to come live with him. Recently, Emma had told him about the shitty apartment she’d been holed up in back in Hatchetfield. How she barely spent any time there, but still had to pay what she called “a stupid amount” of rent on it.

“I swear, it’s like my landlady thinks I can shit money,” she’d said.

“You know, um…” He’d hesitated in asking her to live with him instead. On the one hand, they were soulmates, right? It wasn’t that weird to move in together so quickly. They already knew they would get along. On the other hand, maybe it was weird. Paul hadn’t met any other marked people besides Emma. What did he know about what soulmates did? On the other hand, he wasn’t doing it for that reason, really. He just wanted to help her out by eliminating something she was sinking her money into when she maybe didn’t have to. Then, maybe she wouldn’t have to work so many hours at Beanies. She could study more or sleep more. On the other hand, maybe she wouldn’t take it that way. Maybe she’d see it as him thinking she couldn’t take care of herself and that she needed his help, which wasn’t true at all. Maybe she would want to do it all on her own to feel like she had really accomplished it.

Paul was up to four hands by the time Emma had spoken again. “Yeah, Paul?”

He had looked up, and the beginnings of a grin had been toying at the corners of her mouth. He’d felt heat flushing his whole face.

“Um, I don’t mean to be forward, and you can totally say no if that’s what you want, it wouldn’t offend me or anything, but I just wanted to mention that, if you wanted, you could just,” Come on, Paul, spit it out. “live with me?”

Emma’s eyebrows had risen thoughtfully, and she hadn’t said anything right away.

“I have a house in Elm Grove. It’s not, like, super nice, but I have a guest bedroom you could stay in. I’ve been focusing most of my finances on paying it off for the past few years now, so I wouldn’t need you to pay rent or anything. It’s no big deal. But you really don’t have to if that’s not something you’re comfortable with. I just figured, you know, it might be nice to not have to pay rent on an apartment you barely ever live in. Totally up to you, though.”

“Paul,” she’d said once he’d finished, squeezing his cuffed hands. “Thank you. I’d love to move in with you once we get out of this shithole.”

“Really?” he’d asked, disbelief leaking into his voice.

“Yeah. My apartment is straight fucking trash, I’d do anything to get out of there. And, come on. Saving four hundred eighty-five bucks a month and living with my soulmate? In, like, a real fucking house with more than one fucking room? I don’t see a downside. Unless you have, like, a literal skeleton in one of your closets. You don’t have one of those, do you?”

“What? No!”

“Good, because I would not want to have to cover for you, because I hate talking to cops.”

Paul had blinked. “Are you saying you’d be okay with me murdering someone as long as you don’t have to tell the cops about it?”

“Yes, Paul, god.” She’d sounded exasperated, but a joking smile had been playing across her lips.

He wouldn’t ask her to move in with him right away. He would give her time to fall back into life in Hatchetfield. Once she did, he would make sure he was home when she came home from work, just to be there for her to complain about her coworkers and the asshole customers. They would eat together. Maybe they would cook dinner together, maybe they would prepare something separately, maybe they would just get takeout, but they would eat together. Maybe they would do something together in the evening, maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe Emma would have homework to do or a test to study for, and Paul would just spend the rest of the day like he used to. With a book, or TV, or a movie, or a crossword puzzle. Any way it played out it would be better with Emma there.

It was sappy as _fuck,_ but it calmed him down after being riled up by an apocalypse-related dream, so it served its purpose.

“Besides,” she’d said. “You probably would have been living with me if we’d actually run off to Colorado.”

It had been a two and a half months since Paul had entered solitary. He had seen Emma four times, Xander five times, and Dr. Hughes several times, but that had been it.

But fortunately, he was expecting a PEIP agent to come by and take him to visit Emma again today, so he was much livelier than usual. It was hard to keep himself from staring at the clock waiting for it to be 11:15.

To his surprise, his door opened five minutes earlier than expected. A PEIP field agent came through, closing the door behind him and standing in parade rest in front of it, chin upturned.

“I have a message from Colonel Schaffer to pass along to you, Mr. Bridges,” he said.

“Okay,” Paul responded apprehensively, stopping in his trip to the door.

“Effective immediately, all scheduled visitations have been cancelled until further notice.” The PEIP agent turned to leave.

“Wait, wait!” Paul exclaimed. “What do you mean? I can’t see Emma anymore?”

“Affirmative, Mr. Bridges. This is an order from Colonel Schaffer. Consequences are imminent should you fail to comply.”

And with that, the agent slipped out the door.

Paul felt like the wind had been steamrolled out of him. Sightlessly, he backed up until the backs of his knees hit the edge of the bed. He slumped down until he was sitting on the floor, his elbows on his knees and his head in his palms.

There it was. The last thing keeping him afloat snatched away from him. He could feel himself shrinking into himself, sinking into the despair as he could no longer deny it.

He was incurable. That must have been it. There was no way to get rid of the spores in his system. He would be infected forever, just waiting out the days – hours, minutes – until he lost control again.

And would he be able to wrestle it back? Probably not. He couldn’t think of anything he could do that could surprise the Hive as much as Emma had with their marks.

God, Emma. How could he do this to her? Let her hope when there was nothing to hope for. And he’d lied to her again! He’d ended every visit with “I’ll see you soon” as if he had control over the situation. Had he not learned from the last time? How was he such a dumbass? How was he so good at hurting his new favorite person? How was he incapable of doing the one, simple thing she wanted him to do: fucking stay alive?

Tears ran hot rivers down Paul’s cheeks as his breath became ragged. He gripped tighter and tighter on his hair until he could feel strands being ripped out by the roots. His face screwed up with emotion. It was hopeless, all of it. He’d put himself through hell for two months for nothing. His life was over, but it hadn’t ended just then. It had been over since he’d first stepped foot in the Starlight. It had basically been over as soon as the meteorite crash landed in Hatchetfield.

It felt wild to think that the biggest thing he used to worry about was making a fool of himself in front of a pretty barista. That he might say something she thought was dumb. It felt like nothing compared to what he’d been dealing with lately. But it wasn’t that Paul thought that he hadn’t had plenty to get anxious over before the meteorite landed. A full cup of coffee was plenty of coffee, but Paul felt like hot coffee was being endlessly poured into his already full cup, overflowing and scalding his hand constantly. The coffee wouldn’t stop, and Paul couldn’t move his hand away.

The amount of times he’d wished he’d gotten his shit together in front of Emma faster. It was a lot. He’d been visiting that coffee shop at the same time every day for months, and she’d been at the counter nearly every time. He’d had a crush on her for most of that time, and he’d been so goddamn obvious about it that not only had she noticed, but his coworkers had, too. His coworkers who were either dead or unwilling slaves to an alien hivemind.

Could things have been different if he had? If he had just gathered up the courage to ask Emma for her name after the first couple of times seeing her. Maybe they would have already shown each other their marks before the apocalypse. Maybe he would have been able to convince her to leave Beanies faster. Maybe they could have gotten farther away, turned down a different alley, left Hatchetfield behind. They could have escaped together.

But then he would have been leaving Bill, Ted, and Charlotte for dead. Maybe they could have formulated a different plan with Bill, Ted, and Charlotte before she called Sam. Maybe they could have rescued Alice before she’d been slaughtered. Maybe they could have all ran away. Maybe, with fewer infected people roaming around, PEIP could have handled the apocalypse faster. All if he’d just grown a pair a little sooner.

It was easier to feel like an idiot with hindsight. Knowing now that Emma was his soulmate made all of the fidgeting and stalling he’d done in the past seem a lot sillier.

What was even stupider was the hope he’d felt. When had his life ever thrown him a fucking bone? His life had been nothing but a long string of disappointments and failures. Why should this be any different? Because some mystical tattoo said so? No, that wouldn’t fit the pattern. And why the fuck did he believe in soulmates anyway? Sure, he loved Emma. He had long since lost the ability to lie to himself about that. He really loved her. But all the bullshit about a long life of pure love and happiness? What a gullible idiot he’d been to believe that. That kind of shit was for the movies. The schmaltzy ones starring Richard Gere. Hell, that kind of shit was for other people. Other people fell in love. Other people got married. Other people lived happily ever after. But not him.

No. Paul Matthews was not going to live a long and happy life with the woman he loved. Because Paul Matthews was as good as dead already.

Paul sat there and cried for longer than he’d even thought he could. It was around 4:45 pm, over five hours since he'd been supposed to leave to see her, when he was finally able to give enough of a fuck to get up from the floor. He stood, only to slump down into his bed, his back to the door and the camera. He closed his eyes, figuring he had nothing better to do than just sleep.

Maybe he actually deserved the turmoil his nightmares put him through.


	12. ... and the Strength of the Human Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma talks. Then, she listens.

Emma sat down in the chair in front of the observation window, returning the blank stare of the older occupant of the cell in front of her.

She had visited this cell several times in the past few weeks, but they had never been long visits and she had never said anything to the people inside, even though she’d wanted to. Today, though, she promised herself she wouldn’t chicken out. She had to talk to him. She had to prove that she could stick around during tough times, even if she was only proving it to herself. After all, she wasn’t even sure if he could hear her.

She steeled her nerves and spoke.

“Hi, Tom,” she said. Her brother-in-law stood in the center of the cell, staring unmoving into Emma’s eyes, but only because Emma had positioned herself to be in his line of sight, which hadn’t moved in weeks. The natural set of Tom’s face was an equal blend of menacing and despondent. His clothes were rumpled with blue splatters in various places. His eyes glowed dimly blue.

Meeting his glowing eyes sent a wave of survivor’s guilt through Emma. She felt the urge, as she always had, to get up and leave, but she tamped it down.

“Sorry we haven’t talked much. I’ve been busy with the vaccine.” A partial lie. She had been busy with Greenwood working on vaccine research, but she had also had plenty of in between moments like this one to stop by and catch up. But that didn’t matter now, because she was here talking to him now, right?

“We’ve been having a hell of a time with it,” she mused. “That goo shit you guys puke up is a bitch to figure out, but I did catch something. Apparently, the goo itself is full of those spores that the meteorite gives off, so we think the infection process resembles plant invasion more than chemical mutation. You know, like when a weed grows between the cracks of your driveway, except the driveway is made of dirt and the dandelion is made of concrete. The spores can just overpower the human body and kill certain organs and systems while growing new glands. It’s fucking nasty, Tom, and I fucking hate to think about it. I hate to think about that goddamn meteorite doing all of that stuff to you and to Tim.”

Her eyes drifted to the smaller occupant of the cell, her nephew Tim. He stood in the same stance as Tom and had the same glowing eyes. He almost looked like a smaller copy of Tom with his thick head of Tom’s dark blond hair, but his face – his face was pure Jane. The small, elven nose and the mouth that always seemed seconds away from turning upward mischievously. There was no denying Tim had Perkins blood in him.

“But that’s why I’m doing it, Tom. So you can get this alien shit out of your bodies. So we can maybe be a family?”

She sighed. “I know it was a shitty move to stay away for so long, and I know you’re pissed at me for it. I get it. I’m fucking pissed at me for it, too. I wish I would have just come home after Mom and Dad moved. I wish I would have been there for your wedding and for Tim’s birth. I’m sorry I wasn’t. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to be Jane’s maid of honor, or to be Tim’s babysitter, but I want to be better. I want to try to be Tim’s aunt, but I can’t do that if you keep pushing me out. I want to get to know my nephew and try to make up for all the lost years, so please, just let me in.”

Emotion rose wet in Emma’s eyes. She looked back at Tom and Tim, who hadn’t moved an inch in weeks. Talking to them like this felt like talking to a gravestone. Thinking about getting out of Clivesdale just reminded her of how they had gotten into to Clivesdale in the first place.

“But anyway,” she said, wiping her eyes. “The vaccine. Progress is slow. You might have noticed some guys coming down here to test some rudimentary versions on a couple of your buddies. Well, not your buddies, Tom, but the other people who were taken by the Hive. I think that’s what it called itself – ‘The Hive’. That’s what Paul called it while he was one of them.”

She sighed. “God, Paul. He’s been a saint during all of this. He’s been giving samples to the other guys on the research team for examination for months, all while remaining ‘under observation’” – she said in a mocking tone – “which is PEIP-speak for imprisoned. What fucking sucks about it is that it’s all for nothing. Paul is not under the meteorite’s control anymore, but he’s being treated like a fucking death row inmate. In solitary fucking confinement! You’re not in solitary, Tom, and you’re fucking infected!

“And Paul,” she said, her voice shifting into a grinding mutter. “pretends like everything is okay. Like _he’s_ okay, which he’s not. Of course he fucking isn’t, he’s in fucking solitary, Tom. But when any of those doctors or Xander go to visit him, he’s all ‘Oh, hi, how are you? Oh, I’m doing fine, thanks for asking.’ Like he’s peachy fucking keen! It’s torture what he’s letting them do to him. And I know it’s torturing him. I watch the fucking tapes! I watch that poor motherfucker cry in his sleep nearly every goddamn night. I watch him sit for hours and hours staring at a wall, fiddling with his hands, and shaking like fucking chihuahua. He gets this wide-eyed look on his face that I only saw once when he came storming into Beanies, ranting about the world becoming a fucking musical!

“But he wants to stay, apparently. He wants to help with the vaccine, and he thinks that his blood or whatever can help with progress. I don’t really know if it is helping, human physiology isn’t my area of expertise, but they keep asking for samples, so maybe it is.” She shrugged.

She looked back at Tom, statuesque as ever. “Shit, you don’t know who Paul is, do you?” She lifted up her marked wrist. “Jane told you I was marked, right? Well, so is Paul, and I had to find out during the apocalypse because life can’t be fucking simple, can it?” Emma shook her head and bit her lip. “It’s tough, finally meeting him, and then having to watch him suffer alone. I swear to god, you and Tim are the only things keeping me from forcing him to bust out of here with me.”

Without Emma’s knowledge, a small smile crept onto her face. “You should see the look on his face when I get to visit him. We can do that, now. PEIP only just let us about a month ago, the bastards. He gets this dopey smile on his face, like he was witnessing a miracle or some shit. As if getting to see me were a blessing, which is bullshit, because it shouldn’t be a gift he is given when he behaves, it should be a right. He should have the right to see his soulmate when he wants to, on his time. Hell, I should, too. It’s fucking bullshit.”

It was quiet for a while. Tom’s facial expression hadn’t changed, of course, but to Emma, it looked like he was sending her some knowing pity.

“Jane would have loved Paul, or at least she would have died laughing at him. She always said my soulmate would be some long-haired hippie who lived in a refrigerator box, or some tatted-out punk who only listens to death metal music, but that is not Paul. Paul is blandest person I have ever met. He’s a corporate suit who drinks black coffee and tells cringe-worthy jokes. He’s the guy in a romcom that the girl is best friends with her whole life. He pines after her for years, until the end of the movie where the girl is like ‘Oh, it’s you.’”

Emma thought about all the ‘Oh, it’s you’ moments she’d had with Paul. He did that a lot. “But yeah, Jane would have loved him. They would have gotten along talking about… I don’t know, local stuff? Who in town just had a baby, what new ice cream flavor George is trying out at the shoppe, anything. I bet they would have chatted about nothing for hours while you and me just watched. Or maybe you’d join them, I don’t know. I don’t really know you that well. I only know what Jane told me about you.”

Jane hadn’t told Emma a lot about Tom, since their phone calls were never that long, but Emma knew without a doubt that Jane loved Tom. She’d called Emma a couple of times while Tom had been deployed in Iraq to just talk to someone instead of worrying about Tom. She’d gushed even more about him then. He was a strong-but-silent type. A caring man with a bit of a crude sense of humor but a heart of gold. One night, Jane had been sobbing about how terrified she was that her “Tommy-bear” wouldn’t make it home to meet their son. Being a military wife had not treated Jane well.

But now it was Jane who would never see her son grow up. And Emma who might also never get the chance if they couldn’t get a vaccine.

“A part of me is glad Jane isn’t here, so she wouldn’t have to see this, but another part of me still wishes she was still with us. I loved her, even when we didn’t get along. I wish I would have gotten my head out of my ass so I could have seen her just one more time to apologize for being such a piece of shit. About her grades, about my mark, about everything. I never knew why she hated my mark so much, but she did. So much that that Mom and Dad made me cover it up so she wouldn’t have to look at it. She never told me what her deal was with it, but she was always making snide little comments about it. I guess it was because we were just kids or something, I don’t know.”

She inhaled deeply through her nose. “Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. It’s good to get all of that out before I go see Paul. The guy will just let me go off, but I want to make sure there’s a solid back-and-forth, because god knows he fucking needs it. I’ll talk to you again soon, Tom. See ya.”

Emma stood from her chair and turned to leave the holding wing. As she passed one of the cells, she saw a familiar back of a head. Looking into the cell of one General McNamara was Xander Lee. He was sitting leaned forward, his chin resting on his laced fingers.

“Professor X?” Emma asked, stopping just behind him.

Xander turned to look. “Oh, hi, Emma. What are you doing down here?”

She cocked her head back toward the direction she’d come from. “Visiting my brother-in-law. Checking in with the boss?”

He nodded, pulling out the chair next to him, inviting her to sit. Emma joined him.

“You know, in twenty-five years,” Xander said, turning back to the cell. “I’ve never seen John sit still for so long. He’s normally the kind of guy who likes to keep busy and has to be told to relax.”

“You’re on first name basis with the boss man?”

“Oh, yeah. One of the only ones, too. Not because he has a thing about authority, but because he thinks there are too many Johns out there and he doesn’t want to accidentally confuse anybody.”

“What gave you the honor, then?”

Xander held up his left hand for her to see. His wrist was bare, but there was a black band placed on his ring finger. Turning to look at McNamara, she saw a more traditional gold band on his finger.

“I told John it was a bit silly that they didn’t match,” Xander said, looking down softly at his ring. “He said, ‘they don’t have to match, they just have to fit’. He’s always spouting off lines like that. I swear, he should have been a philosophy major.”

The look on Xander’s face made her think of Paul. “How did you two meet? Through work?”

“Actually, no. Us both working for PEIP was a huge coincidence. We met in the army. I enlisted to help pay for my bachelor’s knowing I’d need to save my money for my Ph.D. We just so happened to be in the same unit. John wasn’t on my radar until a bunch of us were sitting around talking about our degree programs and John mentioned he was getting an astrophysics degree. After I told him I was majoring in theoretical physics, I was just about the only person he would talk to. Well, that’s not true, he talked to everybody, but he would stop talking to people to talk to me. We would talk for hours about physics, and sometimes argue about it, but we also found ways to talk about just about anything.

“During the second half of our first year, he asked me where I was going for our leave. I told him I didn’t have any big plans, I was just going back to my apartment. Then he asked me if I would rather spend leave with him. Naïvely, I said ‘Sure, why not?’ As soon as we were off base, he asked me out to dinner. He was very gentlemanly about the whole thing. He told me he had wanted to ask me out for months, and that that had been his intention behind inviting me to spend leave with him, but explained that he would have no problem continuing our friendship if I didn’t want a relationship. He’d thought he made himself crystal clear back at base, but I was shocked. He was halfway through backpedaling when I agreed to go out with him. And we’ve been together ever since.

“A couple of years into service, we’d both been spotted by PEIP recruiters. They were very hush-hush about what exactly they did, but their offer was still tempting. They hadn’t told either of us that the other was being interviewed for a position, and they told us in no uncertain terms that we weren’t allowed to talk about it, but John still told me everything. He said that he was confident I could keep a secret.” Xander rolled his eyes.

“He took my hands and told me he only wanted to take the job if I did. I asked him how he knew we weren’t being recruited for the same position. He said that there was no way we were, because if this mystery organization had any sense, they would be investing in my research in interdimensional communications and offering me a scientist position rather than the soldier position they were offering him. Say what you will about John, but he’s always had great instincts.”

“So, we both accepted the offers PEIP gave us, and they were exactly what John said they’d be: him as a field agent and me as a researcher. The very first time we walked into PEIP HQ, John took my hand in his firm grip and walked me down PEIP’s halls. I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. He said that he would never even think about working someplace that didn’t accept his sexuality. I found out later that what he meant by that was that he’d asked the recruiters outright in his interview what their organization’s thoughts were on gay people. Apparently, if they’d said anything less than ideal, he would have refused them right then and there.”

“Damn,” Emma said.

Xander smiled. “The rest is pretty much history. We got married seventeen years ago. John rose up the ranks until he couldn’t anymore. PEIP created a new position just for me that allowed me to oversee research projects and go out in the field. We got a little cottage out in the woods thirty minutes from HQ. Life’s been good. Every once in a while, I worry that John won’t come back from a mission, but he always did.” Xander turned longingly toward his stock-still husband.

Xander had been mostly all-business for the time Emma had known him. He would occasionally crack a geeky joke, but they were rare. Now, he looked cracked open and vulnerable as he looked into the cell where McNamara stood, as infected as the rest of them with no cure yet on the horizon.

“What was he like?” Emma asked. “I never got to meet him.”

Xander’s gaze shifted to the table and smiled bittersweetly. “John is the kind of man you notice because he makes you. He likes to say he’s bold, and that’s true. Bold ideas, bold actions, bold plans. He can be forthright to the point of being off-putting for some, but he’s nothing if not honest. Above all else, he’s a good man. I joined the army to pay for my degree, he joined to serve. He genuinely wants to protect humanity because he believes in the good in people. He really sees it, too. He’s incredibly wise. He loves giving those little nuggets of his wisdom to anyone who will listen. I’ve learned so much from him.”

His face turned melancholic again. “I’ll never forgive myself if I can’t find a way to cure him. PEIP needs him.”

Emma could believe that. A lot of people in PEIP had been running around like chickens with their heads cut off for the first few weeks because their general hadn’t been there. If the murmurings of the rest of the research team were to be believed, things usually ran much smoother than they had been with Schaffer in charge, and it was apparently a universal desire across all of PEIP to have McNamara back. Every time someone mentioned his name, it was with admiration.

Looking at Xander now, Emma finally felt like she could relate to Xander in some ways. She put a hand on his shoulder.

“We’re gonna get a cure,” she said. “We’ve been making progress down in the labs, and we’ll make even more once we have an actual botanist on the team.”

One corner of Xander’s mouth turned upward. “I’m working on it, Emma, but thank you again for helping us out. You’ve been a valuable asset.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got something to gain from getting this vaccine made, too.” She stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a soulmate to go visit.”

As she turned around and walked off, she heard Xander mutter a curse to himself and fumble out of his chair.

“Emma!” he called after her. “Wait!”

She turned back to him. “What? I’m late already, Xander.”

“I’m sorry, I was supposed to tell you earlier today and I totally forgot.” He looked guilty. Emma was getting suspicious.

“Forgot to tell me what, Xander?” she said threateningly.

Xander grimaced. “Schaffer revoked visitation rights indefinitely, effective immediately.”

“What the fuck?” Emma screamed.

“I’m really sorry.”

“What the _fuck,_ Lee?! What fucking reason could Schaffer have to fucking do this?! He’s been getting better! Paul and I have jumped through every goddamn hoop you put in front of us! And then the one thing you give us, you take away! And what fucking good is it going to do, huh?! He was in handcuffs already! We were being monitored by like three guys with giant fucking guns! He wouldn’t have been able to hurt me even if he wanted to, and he doesn’t! Jesus fucking Christ! Schaffer, you fucking bitch!”

“Emma –”

“No, fuck you, Xander,” she said, turning her rage and middle finger to him. “Fuck all of you. If any of you actually gave a shit about helping people, you wouldn’t be doing this shit. Paul has been fucking imprisoned for two months when he didn’t commit a crime, and all of you are just letting it happen. So just fuck off.”

Emma stormed off, ready to pick a fight with anyone who looked her in the eye as she tromped down the hall, tear something up, or scream until her throat was raw.

Whichever came first.


End file.
